In iOS 5, the standard StreamToMe player can play audio and video to the Apple TV. However, your Apple TV must be running the latest version of the Apple TV software for this to work.
In iOS 4.3, the default StreamToMe player interface only supports AirPlay audio. To use AirPlay video, you must first change the player interface that StreamToMe uses.
You will need to choose the Apple Movie Player interface from the "Player Interface" section of the "Track Settings" in StreamToMe. "Track Settings" can be reached by tapping on the blue arrow at the right of any file's row. The AirPlay button in this interface will let you select the Apple TV for video and audio output. You can save this setting for all files using the "Save to Global Settings..." button at the bottom of the "Track Settings" screen.
Occasionally, the Apple TV may disappear as an option in the AirPlay menu. If this happens, you will need to terminate StreamToMe to make it appear again. To do this, press the Home button (so you're on the Home screen). Then double tap the Home button to make the multitasking menu appear. Then press and hold the StreamToMe icon in the multitasking menu until a "Do not enter" symbol appears over the top corner of the icon. Press this "Do not enter" symbol to terminate StreamToMe then launch StreamToMe normally; the AirPlay menu should now contain the Apple TV again.
If your Apple TV refuses to accept an AirPlay stream (for example, it shows a "Could not be played" error) you may need to restart your Apple TV. To do this, you must remove the power cable, wait 10 seconds then reconnect the power.
If all of your iTunes files are failing (and none of the thumbnails are loading and none of the file durations appear) then the most likely problem is that the locations ServeToMe is loading from your iTunes Library XML are invalid.
This can happen for one of two reasons:
To change the iTunes Library XML file, use the "Choose Library XML..." button in the ServeToMe window on your computer. The file may be named "iTunes Library.xml" or "iTunes Music Library.xml".
If changing file does not help, then the locations in your Library XML file may be invalid. To confirm whether the file itself is invalid, you can open the XML file in a text editor (like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on the Mac). If you scroll through the file you will see location lines that look like this:
<key>Location</key><string>file://localhost/Users/matt/Music/iTunes/iTunes%20Media/Music/3%20Doors%20Down/The%20Better%20Life/Kryptonite.mp3</string>
Ignore the fact that this location value starts with "file://localhost", uses "%20" instead of space characters and uses "/" instead of "\" on Windows.
Do the location values you see refer to a valid path on your computer? Specifically, is there a folder name missing between the top level and your music folder? Or does the path contain folders that no longer exist? These are the common errors that may appear in an iTunes Library XML file.
If your file does contain invalid locations, you will need to rebuild your iTunes library. The best way to do this is to follow these instructions:
but after step (4) in these instructions, open the XML file in a text editor. Look for an invalid Location string then Find and Replace the error to fix it for all Locations (remember that you should use %20 instead of the space character).
The current implementation of WTV in StreamToMe is listed as "preliminary". The code is incorporated from the open source ffmpeg library but is only a couple weeks old and is not well refined and tested (it suffers from issues with longer files, aspect ratio problems and occasional frame rate problems).
As the ffmpeg library implementation improves, we will incorporate the improvements into ServeToMe.
In the meantime, converting your files to dvr-ms (right click on them in Windows Explorer and the option to do this should appear) may alleviate some of the issues.
Album artwork will only appear for music files that have embedded artwork.
When iTunes downloads artwork from the App Store, it does not embed the artwork in the file. Instead, iTunes stores the artwork in a separate, external database which is not readable by StreamToMe.
On the Mac, you can use an iTunes script to tell iTunes to embed the artwork in the files instead. To do this, download:
And follow the instructions to select files and embed their artwork in them so that the artwork will appear in StreamToMe.
On Window, you can use the VBScript linked on this page:
If you're having difficulty with getting video out, please make sure you are able to play video correctly on your TV from the YouTube or iPod applications. Generally, if these apps can play to the TV, StreamToMe should be able. This will also confirm if the cables are working too.
If you're running iOS 4.0 or older, you must connect the iPhone to the dock before you start StreamToMe or it might not be detected correctly. On iOS 4.1 or newer StreamToMe can switch between video destinations while playing.
Occasionally on the iPhone 3G, 3Gs and similar generation iPod Touches, you may need to restart your iPhone (because there is not enough memory to connect to the TV).
Another problem that can occur is that the dock connection might not work correctly and you just need to reseat the device and try again. Some users have even reported that they needed to reinstall StreamToMe to get iOS to correctly recognize it as a TV-out capable application.
Officially, VIDEO_TS folders and VOB files are not supported with StreamToMe. See:
However, many VOB files will actually play in the current version of StreamToMe since they use an MPEGTS internally (and MPEGTS is supported by StreamToMe. The problem is that ServeToMe does not correctly parse and navigate the DVD structure and due to this, many VOB files will play strangely, some will use huge amounts of CPU and some won't play at all. Certainly, you can try to play some files but quirks are likely exist.
Proper support for VIDEO_TS folders (which will solve the issues ServeToMe has with VOB files) is a planned feature for StreamToMe 4 (at least a few months away at this time).
The only way to stream files from a NAS drive is to mount the drive on a computer running ServeToMe and use ServeToMe running on that computer to share a folder from the NAS.
ServeToMe is required because it is a transcoding server — it live converts all media into an HTTP live streaming format that is supported by iOS devices. Unfortunately, a NAS, a basic file server, or any other type of media streaming devices does not perform this live conversion (they generally serve the file "as is").
Further, StreamToMe requests lots of metadata about the files from ServeToMe. These metadata requests are entirely customized to StreamToMe's needs and ServeToMe has been written explicitly to support these request. The two programs are deeply inter-dependent and neither will work without the other.
The current ServeToMe implementation requires files with a known length and access to the entire data of the file from the outset. These traits are not possible with live or internet streams.
While we will work to see if we can support live or internet streams in future, we can't make any promises at this stage.
If you have a query that isn't covered by these topics please, email: