Sunday, December 25, 2011

Play videos from your computer on your iPad

It seems that now it is not just updates which can be done wirelessly to the iPad, you can even play any music or video sitting on your computer! Well, sitting in iTunes, to be exact. (It works on Mac, I'm not sure about Windows.) That's amazing.
And more amazing yet, this one also works via the Internet. Although obviously if it is a long video it will take a while to download to the iPad, unless you have an exceptionally fast upload link from your computer. (Most Internet connections are much slower to upload than to download, I suspect this is to prevent too durn much file sharing using the ISP's bandwidth.)

I only found out about this because suddenly in the Video app on my iPad, a new tab appeared: "Sharing". I am not even sure if it's due to a software update very recently, or if it's due to a setting I changed somewhere. (Apple is way ahead with sharing apps, files, and streams, but the settings for this are spread over a dozen different apps and devices, very confusing.)

3 comments:

Timo Lehtinen said...

It seems that now it is not just updates which can be done wirelessly to the iPad ...

But how else could it possibly happen? The iPad has no RJ45 socket. All network traffic to the iPad must be carried wirelessly. What is so special about that?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Before, you had to transfer video files (and updates) to the iPad via the plug. Unless you had special software like Airvideo.

Timo Lehtinen said...

I see.