appletvmacstreamingvlc
I'm trying to play videos from my Mac to my Apple TV and am getting the error "cannot proceed. vlc not found". I've tried running older versions of the software and updating VLC both to no avail. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
linked from: Can I stream any video played with VLC player to Apple TV?
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 formatMKV and MP4 are not video format, they are containers. An MKV can contain any type of video/audio stream.
Most of the time, MKV contains H264/AC3 DTS (video/audio; the most common format in blu-ray).
The official specification of MP4 do not allow the AC3 format for the audio channel, but the H264 format is possible for the video. Thus, you can convert losslessly an MKV to an MP4, for the video channel only. The audio channel will have to be re-encoded
I recommend using ffmpeg (a command-line tool) to achieve this goal.
Note: You can try and create an MP4 containing AC3, but I don't think it will work in iTunes or the Apple TV, even though players like MPlayerX or VLC will be able to play them.
Best Answer
Many apps that rely on VLC require it to be location in the Applications folder.
If you've moved VLC or renamed it, try putting it back.