Quick Tip: AirPlay Video Library to new Apple TV without Jailbreaking
We just purchased an AppleTV (2G) for our small bedroom TV and I was bouncing around the idea of hacking/jailbreaking it in order to get our home library that we watch all the way across the house on our Mac Mini, Plex 9 based HTPC extended to play on it and discovered a really quick and painless way to handle this, all without any hacking or warranty voiding to your Apple TV. The current options that require jail breaking are still very much proof-of-concept applications and in my opinion are not quite there yet when it comes to influencing me to jailbreak my shiny new Apple TV. I am honestly looking forward to Apple allowing third-party iOS developers the ability to take advantage of AirPlay functionality so I can simply use my iPhone or iPad to sling my Plex library, full of meta information and playback data right to the Apple TV. Until then, this is a fairly decent solution.
Note, this is not the cleanest, most elegant solution, but it works and it has passed the wife-test already.
Step-by-step instructions:
- Enable AirPlay on your AppleTV
- Install and configure Air Video Server on your Mac that has your video files. This involved pointing Air Video Server to your video library folder(s)
- Install AirFlick, open it and leave it running in the background
- Install Air Video Mac Client and create a new server listing pointed at your Air Video Server
- Connect the client to the server, choose the video you'd like to watch on your Apple TV, and select the 'AirFlick live conversion' option.
- Go enjoy your video on your Apple TV display.