The StreamToMe application requires any iPhone or iPod Touch running iPhone OS 3.0 or greater and requires a copy of ServeToMe running and accessible over Wifi (recommended) or 3G to provide the audio or video streams.
The Mac version of ServeToMe requires an Intel-Mac running Mac OS X 10.5 or greater.
The Windows version of ServeToMe requires Windows XP SP2 or greater.
A 2Ghz dual core CPU speed or greater is recommended and is required for high resolution video.
Remote connections (non-local WiFi or 3G) require that all routers have UPnP or NAT-PMP enabled.
Interference on WiFi networks can be a major factor and signal dropouts or period of low reception can affect playback performance.
ServeToMe can convert video streams from MPEG, MPEG2, MPEG4, H.263, H.264, WMV9, VC-1, VP6, DivX and Xvid codecs and audio streams from MP3, AC3, AAC and WMA9 codecs. Streams can be contained in MP4, AVI, MOV, MPG, FLV, OGG, MKV and WMV file wrappers.
Even within these formats, there may be variations that are not supported. Specifically, files with DRM (like FairPlay protected content from the iTunes Store or most commercial BluRay and DVD discs).
Streaming directly from VOB files is not supported.
From version 1.1, yes.
By default, StreamToMe only searches the "local" domain using Bonjour (Zeroconf) for ServeToMe servers. Broadly speaking, this means that the client and server need to be in the same subnet.
In version 1.1 of StreamToMe you can manually specify an IP address. Assuming your server is in an accessible location, this will allow you to access it over 3G or from a remote WiFi location. It is your responsibility to ensure accessibility is possible for this purpose.
If all clients are watching the same video, then the biggest limitation is likely to be network bandwidth — how many 2Mbit/s streams can your Mac's network connection support?
With interference, reception issues and traffic counted from the Mac to the router and then router to iPhone, an 802.11g connection is capable of around 4-8 streams.
However, for most situations, the biggest limitation on the number of clients is likely to be CPU speed for encoding different streams.
For clients watching different videos, the number is determined by CPU performance. In our testing a Quad Core 2.67Ghz Xeon can support approximately 6 simultaneous transcodes of 480p video in realtime and a 3.06 Ghz Core 2 Duo can support 3. Different CPUs with different numbers of cores will support relatively varying numbers of streams.
Video with higher than 720p resolutions can pose heavy CPU burdens and may not be possible to transcode in realtime on slower CPUs. There is also significant overhead with some codecs — some files may be slower than others.
No. The iPhone is very specific about the streaming media format and settings it requires — leaving no significant room for different settings.
No. To save video to your iPhone you must convert them yourself and copy them across using iTunes.
Yes, version 1.1 of ServeToMe will allow seeking to any point in the file at any time.
This happens when the iPhone/iPod Touch decides it should switch to a different quality stream. This decision is made by the device and is not directly under StreamToMe's control.
On a local WiFi connection you will see this if the available bandwidth drops below 1Mbps (which can happen due to momentary interference) or if the computer is too slow to encode a segment.
On a remote WiFi connection, this quality switch may occur more often as the available bandwidth may be more variable.
If the change in available bandwidth or encoding performance is only temporary, then the quality will switch back when the interruption ends.
Note: if you connect using a manual address, the iPhone will always start on the "medium" bandwith stream (approximately 512kbps). If your available bandwidth is enough to support the high bandwidth stream, you may notice a transition to the higher quality stream after 10-20 seconds.
Yes. You must connect the TV at least 2 seconds before playback begins (the video will not switch from your iPhone/iPod to the TV while playing even though the audio will).
Not at this time. We hope to include this in a future version.
StreamToMe supports folders of alias files on the server to handle this functionality. There are iTunes scripts that will make aliases of selected files for this purpose.
You need to add a shared folder containing movies on the server. You can do this in the ServeToMe window on your Mac by pressing the "+" button underneath the "Shared Folders" section.
In StreamToMe, only files with the following extensions (filename suffixes) will appear:
If your movie file is correctly one of these type but does not have the correct extension, add the extension and try again.
This happens when the player can't load the next segment required for playback. This can happen for a number of reasons:
If you weren't doing anything at the time (the the iPhone or the server) then the most common cause is a network error. It is possible that there is an issue with your network but the problem could also be due to Wifi dropout problems on the iPhone (see Sometimes my Wifi drops out when playing. What's happening?).
Points 2 and 3 are covered by the separate topic: Sometimes playback refuses to start for 5 to 10 seconds. What's wrong?
In other cases, if the problem is simply a temporary network slowdown or the iPhone's playback has simply exceeded the encoding progress on the server, then playback will resume once more encoded segments are available.
If you quit or stop the server while a client is playing or the server becomes otherwise inaccessible, the iPhone will not necessarily detect this problem and will show no feedback. This is a limitation of Apple's media playback on the iPhone. If you close the playback window and reselect the same file, an error explaining the problem will display.
If the iPhone encounters significant Wifi interference, it may drop the connection to a low data rate — too low for video playback. You can tell this has happened because the iPhone shows just 1 bar of reception in the Wifi icon in the status bar.
If the iPhone drops to 1 bar of reception, you can restart the Wifi by turning it off and then on again in the Settings application. You can prevent the issue reoccuring by enabling Interference Robustness on your wireless router or taking other steps to improve signal.
The iPhone is supposed to start immediately once the media playback window is presented or after seeking through the file, but it sometimes takes 5 to 10 seconds before anything happens. Pressing the play button does not make it start any faster.
Nothing is wrong, this behavior appears to be the iPhone's media player controller clearing and then reloading data from the network and playback queues.
If you press the "Done" button (closing the playback window) during this delay, sometimes the sound of the closed movie will start playing over the navigation menu. This is related to the delay issue and is not a bug in StreamToMe.
Probably not. The playback window and most of the playback controls are directly controlled by the iPhone (not the application). Once the playback window opens the behavior is largely not controllable by the application.
You must have a copy of ServeToMe running in the same Bonjour/Zeroconf domain as the iPhone and the port on which ServeToMe is running must be accessible (not firewalled) to the iPhone. You can set the port on which ServeToMe runs if required.
We cannot offer help in solving general network issues and suggest you consult your network administrator or wireless modem vendor for help in solving these issues.
ServeToMe runs in the "status menu" area (right side of the menu bar). You can find its icon there.
If you want to change ServeToMe so that it appears in the Dock, right-click on the ServeToMe application icon in the Finder (control-click if you don't have a right mouse button) and select "Show Package Contents". Open the "Contents" folder then open the "Info.plist" file in that folder. You can open this in any text editor (like TextEdit) or in the Property List Editory (if installed).
If you opened the file in a text editor, you will see:
<key>LSUIElement</key> <true/>
change this "true" text to "false" and save. The next time you launch ServeToMe, it will open in the Dock.
If you opened the file in the Property List Editor you will see a row labelled "Application is agent (UIElement)". Uncheck the checkbox for this row and save the file. The next time you launch ServeToMe, it will open in the Dock.
Yes. You must have installed the application for this to work (dragged it from its original location inside the Disk Image to Applications or another folder on your hard disk). Follow these steps to make ServeToMe run at login:
In addition to the requirements for local access, remote access over WiFi or 3G requires the following:
You can check your external IP address here: http://checkmyip.com. If you have a dynamic IP address, then your address may change regularly and you may need to configure a Dynamic Name for your computer (as provided by opendns.org or dyndns.com) to ensure you have a consistent address you can use.
ServeToMe will automatically open a port to through your router if your router supports UPnP/NAT-PMP. If your router does not support UPnP/NAT-PMP, then you must configure it to open ServeToMe's port manually. Due to the situation specific nature of network configuration, support cannot be provided for opening ports in situations where UPnP/NAT-PMP is not available.
If you disable or delete the STPMapPorts value in the application's Info.plist file, ServeToMe will not open ports for external access.
To edit the Info.plist, right-click on the ServeToMe application icon in the Finder (control-click if you don't have a right mouse button) and select "Show Package Contents". Open the "Contents" folder then open the "Info.plist" file in that folder. You can open this in any text editor (like TextEdit) or in the Property List Editory (if installed).
Change the "<true/>" following the STMMapPorts line to "<false/>" to disable.
If you enter a path value in the Info.plist file under the STMTemporaryDirectory value, ServeToMe will store its temporary files at this location.
Set the value to an empty string or remove it entirely to let ServeToMe use the default location. If this value is not empty but is not a valid, writeable directory path, ServeToMe may crash or behave strangely.
To edit the Info.plist, right-click on the ServeToMe application icon in the Finder (control-click if you don't have a right mouse button) and select "Show Package Contents". Open the "Contents" folder then open the "Info.plist" file in that folder. You can open this in any text editor (like TextEdit) or in the Property List Editory (if installed).