Stream any video played with VLC player to Apple TV
appletvvideovlc
Can I stream any video played with VLC player to Apple TV ?
Any additional plug-in for it…?
Best Answer
It's not using VLC (although it uses some of its components and should be able to open anything VLC can open), but it looks like there's a way to do this. It requires on-the-fly transcoding for formats the AppleTV doesn't support (essentially anything not .mp4 or .m4v), which means it may take a fair bit of CPU power on your Mac, especially for HD stuff. It also means that aside from files the AppleTV natively supports, you're not getting bit-perfect renditions of the files, it's a lossy translation, but if you have a decently fast Mac, it should be pretty good.
The main tool you'll want is AirFlick. It's a pretty basic program that sends a URL to the AppleTV that tells it to open a stream from your computer. It also handles transcoding the non-native files. It's not very well documented; it looks like the latest versions use a built-in copy of ffmpeg for transcoding, but some of the resources around the web suggest that it may need VLC installed as well.
Usage is pretty straight forward.
Open up AirFlick
Select your AppleTV from the drop-down in the upper-left
Drag the file you want to play onto the droplet, and hit play.
It should take around 30 seconds to buffer the transcoding, then start playing. It's definitely beta software, so YMMV.
From what I can tell, the transcoding support is pretty simplistic. If you want to configure the transcoding process, you need to use custom VLC or ffmpeg command-line options and pass the output to AirFlick.
This guide from TUAW should give you a starting point for how to do that, but you'll want to consult other VLC or ffmpeg resources for specific configurations - it's beyond my expertise. The basic idea seems to be:
Use VLC or ffmpeg to transcode the source (in the example, that's dvdread:///dev/rdisk5@1:3-, replace that with the path to your file of choice) on-the-fly to an AppleTV compatible format
Pipe that output to mediastreamsegmenter which breaks the video into a streaming playlist the AppleTV can read
Host the streaming playlist on a webserver on your Mac
Use AirFlick to pass the URL of the playlist to your AppleTV
You could try the Airplay functionality for iPhone ( though I'm not sure if it is available on all iPhone devices, but it is on the 4S ).
Then try and find an Airplay plugin for VLC.
It's already possible for Windows Media Player so VLC can probably do it too ( and be better at it, because you know, it's VLC ).
I haven't tested it myself, but it's probably worth trying out.
Unfortunately not. The VLC app was yanked from the app store some time ago due to some political issues within the developer base and conflicts with the app store policies. It hasn't been updated since then, and likely won't in the future. Also because it plays video in formats the iPad and Apple TV don't support, it's unlikely AirPlay support could be added anyway.
You might be able to use the iPad HDMI adapter to mirror the display on the TV, but I'm not sure how that performs with video going.
It's a bit outside the scope of AskDifferent, but there are several boxes similar in concept to the Apple TV that support a lot broader range of formats (much closer to VLC's level of support). I'm not aware of any that interface with an iPad, but most play from an attached hard drive or a network share. The WDTV Live and the Patriot Box Office are two popular ones, but there are many more.
Best Answer
It's not using VLC (although it uses some of its components and should be able to open anything VLC can open), but it looks like there's a way to do this. It requires on-the-fly transcoding for formats the AppleTV doesn't support (essentially anything not .mp4 or .m4v), which means it may take a fair bit of CPU power on your Mac, especially for HD stuff. It also means that aside from files the AppleTV natively supports, you're not getting bit-perfect renditions of the files, it's a lossy translation, but if you have a decently fast Mac, it should be pretty good.
The main tool you'll want is AirFlick. It's a pretty basic program that sends a URL to the AppleTV that tells it to open a stream from your computer. It also handles transcoding the non-native files. It's not very well documented; it looks like the latest versions use a built-in copy of ffmpeg for transcoding, but some of the resources around the web suggest that it may need VLC installed as well.
Usage is pretty straight forward.
It should take around 30 seconds to buffer the transcoding, then start playing. It's definitely beta software, so YMMV.
From what I can tell, the transcoding support is pretty simplistic. If you want to configure the transcoding process, you need to use custom VLC or ffmpeg command-line options and pass the output to AirFlick.
This guide from TUAW should give you a starting point for how to do that, but you'll want to consult other VLC or ffmpeg resources for specific configurations - it's beyond my expertise. The basic idea seems to be:
dvdread:///dev/rdisk5@1:3-
, replace that with the path to your file of choice) on-the-fly to an AppleTV compatible format