[brems0r@gmail.com]

Hi there,

I am searching an application (free or paid) that supports the following:

* _streaming_ media (video, pictures, and audio) from my SMB-shared media library on my home server directly to my iphone over wifi

I already had a look at VLC which supports streaming over network, but unfortunately not via SMB but FTP :/
Also, DLNA is not an option for me since user access cannot be configured/restricted.

Help anybody?

[kch50428]

If the video is in a format that iTunes recognizes, all you need to do is add the videos to your iTunes library, and home-share the library. Same for audio. And you can set pictures to be synched via iTunes as well. You don't need any other apps.

[brems0r@gmail.com]

Hi Keith, thanks for answering and the suggestions.

IIRC, the video files are mostly *.mkv containers with x264 codec.

I am not sure whether Itunes supports these codecs, but then again I don't even have it installed on my pc (and don't want to). Also I am no big fan of syncing (which basically is downloading content to a device and then playing it) but rather want to stream content on-demand over the network. I do realise the that there is significant user-friendliness of the apple ecosystem which is what you described. But there ought to be a solution for people that don't exclusively use apple products, which IMO should be the majority of users.

So my questions remains, are there any apps that will do what I want?

[warcraftWidow]

AirVideo might. It still requires a PC though for a server component. The server component grabs the files and transcodes them on the fly to the correct format and streams them to the iOS app. And no iTunes won't play mkv format.
Not sure if there are any apps that read directly from a network drive and do the transcoding in the app.