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Although the iphone’s multigigabyte capacity allows a signiicant amount of media to be stored on it, it probably isn’t big enough to hold your entire collection of music and videos. To still be able to access your computer’s vast media collection, you will have to stream it over the internet. The good thing is that you can access your desktop computer anywhere in the world from your iphone, as long as you have internet access. Whether you use a Mac or pc, setting up a media stream from your computer is very easy—and free!

Mac

For streaming on Macs, you will be using a system called Telekinesis that allows for (appropriately) remote control of your Mac using your iphone. Telekinesis uses applescript to manipulate your Mac in many ways, differently from Vnc. Download the iphone Remote application from http://code.google.com/p/telekinesis. The irst time you run it, it will ask you to set up a username and password for logging in to your computer. To stream videos over Telekinesis, go into iphone Remote’s conigurations. if you enable “share media insecurely,” you won’t need a password, but it also allows anyone who contacts that port and knows the direct path of your iles to download them.

Make sure that iphone Remote is running. on your iphone, open up safari and type in the ip for your Mac, starting with https://.

Accept the certiicate, and log in with the account that you created when you irst ran iphone Remote. This will bring you to the main screen.

As you can see, there are many different applications that you can use with Telekinesis, but for now we will concern ourselves only with Media. Tap Media to open a browser of your ilesystem.

Now that you have it all working on your local Lan, you need to get it working through your irewall. The basic procedure is to set a static ip on your Mac, use a dynamic Dns service so that you can attach a name to your home ip address, and then conigure your internet gateway for port forwarding. once you know the URL to your home pc, you can connect from anywhere has more information on this common but sometimes complicated task.

If your media is elsewhere, it’s easy enough to ind with Telekinesis’s browser. now just tap to open the video or song, and it will begin streaming. it will continue to play if you go into another iphone app, but not if you switch safari pages.

pc

If you’re a pc user, or you’d rather use a pc to set up your iphone media server, there’s an even easier solution to your remote-media needs. orb is a software + service that helps you access your media anywhere. and naturally, they’ve added support for the iphone.

Go to http://corp.orb.com/download_orb, create a user account, download orb, and then install it. once it is installed on your computer, start the program and you’ll see a new icon for orb at the bottom right of your monitor. Right click the icon, and select coniguration. in the coniguration menu, click on the Media tab to select which media folders on your computer will be streamed by orb.

Whenever the orb application is running on your computer, your media is being streamed, and is accessible from anywhere. The orb software and website handles all the complicated parts of irewalls and transcoding. once you have orb conigured correctly, you can access it from any browser, not just your iphone, via http://mycast.orb.com. Log into your account, and you now have access to all the media on your computer, even if you’re thousands of miles away from it!

The orb application costs $10, but the good thing is that you can run the free version of their app store app and connect to your server to see whether the service works for you before you buy.

Linux: MythtV

The Linux-based DVR project MythTV is a powerful system for viewing and recording TV. With a lot of hard work and a little luck, you can stream recorded shows from your MythTV computer to your iphone.

For the purposes of this hack, we’ll assume that you have to get MythTV set up and running on a computer. if not, instructions can be found on the MythTV wiki (www.mythtv.org) and support pages for your speciic Linux distribution.

1. Make sure that you have the MythWeb package installed, and that you can view your MythTV web page from another computer.

2. The next step is to transcode the recordings into Mp4 format. Detailed instructions can be found on the MythTV wiki (http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/streaming_to_ipod_touch_ or_iphone). The basic process is to create a script that uses ffmpeg to transcode into an ipod-friendly format.

Make sure to test this on your MythTV system before continuing. From a terminal, run the script on a recording, and conirm that the output can be played by mplayer, or any other media player. lib-faac is a common source of issues, and depending on the Linux distribution you’re using, you may need to compile lib-faac from its source.

3. after conirming that transcoding works, load mythtv-setup and create a user job to call the transcoding script that you created. in this case, the user job is named “ipod transcoding.”

4. enter MythTV frontend, and set the user job to run automatically after a recording is inished.

5. conirm that MythTV can run the user job correctly by selecting a recording, then click “run ipod transcoding.”

6. Wait a few seconds, then open a terminal and enter ps -ef|grep ffmpeg. conirm that ffmpeg is running. if the only output is only “grep ffmpeg” or blank, go back to the “system information” screen in MythTV, and conirm that the user job status is “running” and not “queued.” if MythTV lists it as running, and there is still no ffmpeg process, then the syntax of the user job is probably incorrect. Double-check it in mythtv-setup and conirm that it is correct.

7. Because MythTV can’t manage the transcoded iles, you will need to create a cron job to delete the Mp4 iles after the associated recording has been deleted.

8. The MythTV-for-iphone project is available on Google code, (http://code.google.com/p/ mythtv-for-iphone/wiki/installationGuide) and provides an iphone-formatted web interface to the recorded MythTV programs.

9. Download the MythTV-for-iphone iles, and install smarty and php-curl. The smarty directories should go in the root web folder. For example, if the mythweb folder is under /var/www/ mythweb, then the smarty folders would go into /var/www/smarty. smarty templates would be installed into /var/www/smarty/templates.

10. create a mythiphone directory (/var/www/mythiphone) and copy the MythTV-for-iphone php iles into it. copy i_settings.php.dist to i_settings.php and edit it based on the settings of your MythTV server.

11. Update apache2.conf and add the line: Alias /recordings <mythtv recording folder> at the end of the ile.

The MythTV-for-iphone project references the /recordings folder, and without this alias, the recordings won’t show up.

At this point, everything should be installed. on the iphone, open safari and navigate to the iPhone folder on your MythTV server. For example, 192.168.2.101/mythiphone. any recordings that are green should be viewable on the iphone.

If you want to access the recordings from a remote location, you will need to assign your MythTV server a static ip. if you want to password protect the mythiphone folder, you should conigure apache’s basic authentication feature (see http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/howto/auth.html).