VLC Streamer

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Like many other WD media player owners, I have lots of movie ISO files on the two hard drives connected to my WD player.

To play these movies stored on these drives on to my portable iThings, I have had to take these ISO files and run them through a program (e.g. Handbrake) to make new m4v files that are playable on the iPad.  I got to thinking, this is kind of a waste of time to make all these extra files. so I went looking for a program that enables the iPad and iPhone to play these ISO files without repurposing them into another file format.  I found a program recently that I have been experimenting with, and for you Android owners out there, there is an Android version of this program, too.  It is called VLC Streamer.

There is a free and a $1.99 version of VLC Streamer.  The free is ad-supported, the pay-for version is ad-free.  I have not bought the ad-free version yet, as I want to explore the free one first.  So, far, so good.  As one might imagine, VLC Streamer app works with the VLC program on one’s computer.  It basically runs VLC in the background on the PC and the output of VLC is streamed to the wireless portable device.  The result is that the CPU of my PC is running at 100% or nearly so during the time streaming takes place.  To really stream this stuff well to a wireless device one really needs a very fast wired and wireless network in the home, which I have.  Nonetheless, I still had some issues with jerky video until I learned that the framerate setting of VLC Streamer needs to be set, for the most part, to “original framerate” of the source.  (It was not set this way out of the box.)  So, now that this setting is correctly in place, the jerkiness is all but gone, and watching the resultant videos is quite acceptable.

OK, now to the other reason I am posting this:  Are any others of you folks using VLC Streamer, and do you feel it it a worthwhile program, or do you have a better suggestion?

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I use it on my computer, awesome program, definitely the best one that I know.

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Alucardx23 wrote:

I use it on my computer, awesome program, definitely the best one that I know.

Thanks for the input!  It’s good to know I found the “best one”.  OK, of course, you “use it on your computer” (the Helper program needs to be installed and running on the PC to kick VLC into running and stream the movie so the iPad app can take over the rest.).  Did you mean to imply something additional by your response?  What devices do you stream to?

BTW, I had enough success with the free version yesterday, that I spent my life savings to buy the $1.99 ad-free version.  I am running into some glitches, and it might be because I am using a Gen 1 iPad.  I need to test my wife’s Gen 3 version (when she returns home) and see if my buffering issues are better resolved and gone completely.  Even, so, it’s not that slow that by waiting a while for VLC to process the video a couple of minutes, so that the Gen 1 can run the ISO movie smoothly; even at High Res setting.

Here’s a thought:

You have been around this forum quite awhile, don’t you think that WD could build something into their media player that mimics what VLC Streamer can do?  I think they could, since the media player can play all these media files anyway (incl ISO) therefore a streaming feature could be part of the media player, (no VLC running on PC required) and then there could be a WD mobile app like VLC Streamer to **bleep** those streams from the media player and play them on the mobile devices?  If they do this, they would have a bang-up media player!