Watching video on the iPhone is a joy: the screen is vibrant and crisp. But if there’s one major problem with video on the iPhone, it’s the lack of storage space. Even an 8GB iPhone can only hold a few movies at a time, especially if you also want to store music and photos.
The folks at Embraceware have pointed out one way that you can work around this problem. If you happen to have a lot of movies stored on your home Mac, you can enable Web Sharing on it and then watch your videos on the iPhone by accessing them via Safari (as long as said movies are in an iPhone-compatible video format). They give you a step-by-step set of instructions for doing just this.
Supposedly this method works pretty smoothly on a local network, but if you want to access those videos from anywhere, you’ll have to do a little more tweaking on your network setup (port forwarding and firewalling, for example). Also, you’ll probably find pretty quickly that performance isn’t as good, especially for long, high-quality video files.
Given this a try? Let us know how it’s worked for you.
[via Digg]
I use DOT.TUNES (dottunes.net) to do the same with my iTunes library. Like your report above, it's super fast when I access via my local network. It's also fast using my computer at work. But if you only have EDGE then it slows down appreciably.
Yup, works great! I actually thought of this a few weeks ago, when I realized just how much space a full-length movie takes up. Either I severly pare down what music iTunes syncs, or I skip movies on my iPhone. With this, I can have both, at least when I'm at home!
Tell me why I'd want to watch the movie on my iPhone instead of on the (presumably) bigger computer screen at home?