Wireless video routing

iPhone, Movies

Made possible by the A5 CPU.

AirVideo:

A few months ago I wrote about ZumoCast, software which, when installed on a computer and an iPad or iPhone would permit routing of movies on that computer to the iDevice wirelessly. The use was obvious. When you have a lot of movies on your computer or on a file server connected to that computer, it’s nice to be able to view them remotely. The iPad is ideal for this sort of thing when you are in bed!

Sadly, ZumoCast is not available for iOS any more. Motorola bought the company and that business now belongs to Google. Google and Apple are not friends. Goodbye ZumoCast.

But there’s a new alternative named AirVideo, available for your iDevice for all of $2.99 with a free app which has to be installed on the computer in question, as with ZumoCast. AirVideo works well and you can enjoy movies over wifi from your file server or computer on your iPad or, for those with great eyesight, on an iPhone. My iPad 1 or iPhone 4S receives and plays the video and sound fine as long as I am in range of the home wifi.

Rebroadcasting:

But why not take it a step further?

One of the major changes in the iPhone 4S and iOS5 is the ability to rebroadcast whatever the 4S shows on its screen to any display device to which an AppleTV is connected. This is non-trivial and Apple has done a poor job of publicizing this feature, also available on an iPad2. Earlier iDevices which do not have the fast A5 CPU in the iPad2/iPhone 4S cannot do this. They call this AirDisplay and it’s much improved in iOS5.

The Apple TV is an inexpensive, unobtrusive gem, much underappeciated and poorly marketed. I wrote about it extensively, starting here.

Invoking AirDisplay:

First hop into AirVideo on your computer, set up the directories where your movies reside – this only has to be done once – and you can start AirVideo on the iDevice.

To enable rebroadcasting of the iDevice’s display, double click the Home button on the iPhone 4S/iPad2, then swipe the displayed app icons at the base of the screen twice to the right. (Clicking the AirDisplay icon from within an app does not cut it). You will see a volume slider and the AirPlay redirection icon. Touch that icon and available output devices will be displayed. If you have an Apple TV on the same wifi network it will appear as a choice. Choose it. Below the Apple TV choice, if you have upgraded the ATV to OS 4.4 or later, you will see a Mirroring button. Turn it on. (If your ATV is on OS 4.3 or earlier that button will be missing. Update your ATV software).

Air Display Mirroring control in iOS5, on an iPhone 4S.

Choose the movie to watch on the iPhone/iPad and you will see:

You can now play the movies on the display attached to the AppleTV you chose earlier.

Topolgy:

  • My stored movies reside on the ‘file server’ – a bunch of wired hard disk drives.
  • The file server is connected to the MacMini and can play those directly.
  • I am instead re-routing them to the iPhone 4S and thence to the AppleTV, both wireless.
  • The software on the MacMini and iPhone 4S is AirVideo.
  • The Apple TV routes the wireless video signal to a wired screen of choice – to any screen the AppleTV is attached.

Here’s how things are connected:

AirServer topology.

Why bother? After all you could simply watch the movie on the MacMini without any of the other hardware or software.

And why not just put all the movies in iTunes on the MacMini?

Well, first iTunes is very restricted as to which file type it will accept. No .avi, no .VOB, etc. And my stored movies are in many different formats.

Second, the display device with its attached ATV can be anywhere there is a wifi signal!

And, finally, the hard wired approach dictates just that – physical wire connections which are not always possible.

So to get a wireless signal to a remote big screen, say, without having to move server boxes or having to run cables, all that’s needed is an iPhone 4S/iPad 2 (the iPad 1’s CPU cannot hack it and stutters), and an ATV connected to the remote display device of choice – big screen TV or overhead projector. The iPhone 4S acts not only as receiver/converter/transmitter but also as a wifi remote, no IR line-of-sight controller required.

When a call comes in, the movie is automatically paused and the phone call is answered. When you hang up, one touch on the iPhone’s screen gets the movie playing again.

Display quality is identical to that when the movie source is hard wired to the display.

Is that serious magic or what?

You can get some sense of how much faster the 4S is at processing tasks, compared with its forerunners, from this Apple Insider chart:

I think I have just solved remote routing of movies from the file server to a large, remote drop down screen!

Performance:

I ran a full length HD movie through this and the iPhone 4S used about 40% of its battery during the two hour test. It is working very hard, converting the received movie from the MacMini on the fly and rebroadcasting it to the Apple TV. Despite that the movie does not stutter. If the battery is low simply connect the iPhone to a USB connection on a local laptop or to the mains. iPad2 users should have no battery capacity issues.

Oh! Siri

iPhone

Language, language, language.

One of the more inspired pieces of marketing surrounding the iPhone 4S is the funny answers Siri, the voice recognition/AI technology, gives to philosphical questions. These are all over the web so I will not regale you with them here. The genius of these is that they humanize and personalize a piece of otherwise dispassionate technology.

However, one thing which I at first found to be frustrating was my low success rate in getting Siri to understand me. I was getting maybe a 50% error rate. So I thought ‘Beta release, whatever’ and took the dog for a walk. While conversing with the pup he pointed out to me that I do speak ‘sort of funny‘ and should really know my place in the former colonies. He’s from Yorkshire so that was rather like the pot calling the kettle black, but I let it go.

Then, as luck would have it, I learned that Settings->General->Siri on the iPhone 4S offers no fewer than five language choices. There is The Queen’s English, Former Penal Colony English (there goes my Australian readership!) and what passes for English in the site of George III’s greatest folly, as well as French and German. Ah! I switched to Buckingham Palace and the change was a revelation. Siri’s error rate went to almost zero and sentences were almost always transcribed correctly!

So I got my boy on the job. He hangs out too much with me and speaks sort of funny too. We had been trying to cheat on his homework using Siri and the Wolfram Alpha search engine built into every iPhone 4S and had given up in mighty frustration trying to get it to ‘Define Product’. After no fewer than forty tries, I put on my best American accent, which is truly ghastly at the best of times, and, Bingo!, right first time. Now, seconds later, with Siri switched to The Queen’s English, the computer voice changed from that of a nice American woman to a slightly inebriated-sounding Englishman. Well given the climate over there I could understand and forgive him having a pop or two and I could only approve of the transformation in accuracy. We both tried ‘Define Product’ several times. Yup, you guessed it. Right every time.

So now I decided to get ambitious and asked American Siri for local Mexican restaurants. Once I got the accent right she came up with the goods.

American Siri

Next, switching to Her Majesty’s lingo, I gave the friendly inebriate a shot and what did I get?


British Siri

Oh! dear. Apple has made the error of assuming that British English speakers only reside outside the US whereas in fact there are several million of us refugees here, basking in political and relative economic freedom.

I gave it another shot and switched to French Siri. No go. Location lookup doesn’t even work for French Siri, suggesting again that language is driving lookups, rather than physical location. And, presumably, the Académie française has yet to approve the dictionary, which may take several years.

In any case, now that I was a relative Siri convert, I called the mothership and got Lance at Apple Customer Care in Indiana. He listened hard and concluded I was onto something, passing my findings to Siri’s programmers. Thus, when version 0.1 comes out, all you British English speakers out there residing in America will know whom to thank. The call with Lance actually took 20 minutes. 5 to discuss my findings and 15 of me comparing the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 4S in aiding him in his buying decision, which has to be one of the stranger conversations I can recall having. He now knows all about Geekbench tests and CPU/GPU specs in the product he supports ….

As for asking Siri about Henri Cartier-Bresson in English, or even in American, fughedaboutit. She/He is clueless. Can’t understand a bloody word.

In the interest of research, I asked an English resident British English speaker to try the test on her 4S using American Siri. Sure enough. Same error. Nice to know Apple is a hotbed of equal opportunity discrimination.

iPhone 4S + Snapseed

Photographs

A combination made in heaven.

One of the signal benefits of the iPhone 4S and iOS5 is the ability to keep everything in sync wirelessly. No computer is needed. The 4S is the computer.

Well, with Snapseed on your iPhone, of which I wrote here, you might argue that Lightroom/Photoshop/Aperture/iPhoto are things of the past. The iPhone is the photo processor.

Snapseed is an extraordinary tailoring of photo processing power to the touch interface. I will not belabor the point, rather preferring to illustrate it with a picture straight from the iPhone 4S, first shown unprocessed here, with one processed on the iPhone 4S in Snapseed. Not only was this a simple process, it actually made ‘darkroom’ work fun.

Here’s the original followed by the Snapseed version:

De Soto. iPhone 4S, 1/120, f/2.4. ISO 80

Who needs a computer?

Snapseed? You got $5?

The FSA in color

Photographers

Magnificent work.

Who is not familiar with the great Farm Security Administration photographers’ work? One of FDR’s best ideas, these great photojournalists recorded the first Great Depression in stunning black and white.

As luck would have it, a friend sent along a link to the Denver Post with no fewer than seventy extraordinary color works. Most have wonderful color with the exception of #19, which has a bad magenta cast, which I have fixed and reproduce below. Click for the article and prepare to be moved.

Click the image for the photographs.

New! Improved!

iPad

Finally, a proper iPad theme.

Those masochistic enough to read this blog on their iPhones have, for a long time now, been presented with a nice simple theme, devoid of the clutter in the desktop theme with its myriad of menus and dropdowns.

Well, finally, a like theme comes to iPad users, where at least you can make things out on the nice, large screen.

This is what iPad mavens have seen until now:

Not pretty.

Fire it up on your iPad and you now see this.

Here’s the top of the menu:

And here’s the bottom, allowing those who prefer pain to revert to the desktop theme:

And if you want to access all the historical goodness, erudition and deep thought, you need only touch the ‘Blog’ button for the Categories dropdown:

Enjoy!