Streaming video to ipad/iphone

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Hi guys, im after some more advice if possible following on from storing my tunes library on an external hard disk thread a wee while back.

I have said hard disk plugged into my router with all my music and films on it to allow any device on my wi-fi round the house to be able to access it. All is working nicely.

I also have an ipad. I can access the movies on the hard disk on the ipad using Air Video installed on my pc. Again this works fantastically well. However the downside to this is i need my PC to be on all the time in order to act as a middle man between the ipad and the hard disk. Is there any way wherby i can access the hard disk directly from the ipad without having to go via another computer? Most of the apps ive seen seen to go through this route so i dont know if im asking the impossible? Would be nice to access films etc on the ipad without having to switch anything else on.

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Morfik]

The options are:

Use VLC or CineXplayer and copy the files to your iPad via iTunes first. Unfortunately this requires you to know what you want to watch in advance and you can't have access to your whole library immediately.

Try the OPlayer app. I've not used it but it works like VLC / CineXplayer i.e. it needs the files on the iPad to transcode but in the description it mentions you can copy files to the iPad via Wifi. So you'd have to wait for them to copy before you could play but you wouldn't need your PC on, *assuming it can copy from an external harddisk.

 

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thanks for that oplayer looks quite good.

Adding the files to the ipad isnt really an option, well it is but its not really what i want to do.

At the moment i have some files on the ipad and i can stream from the hard disk but only when the PC is on.

As an example when everything else is off i switched on my PS3 and immediately it detected the drive attached to the network and i could browse the files directly and play them. This is the equivalent functionality im after through the ipad with nothing else switched on.

Its far from a big deal, im happy with it but i just wondered if i was missing a trick somewhere!!