I have a lot of home videos on my PC in .avi form that I would like to
stream to my HDTV downstairs. I have an Apple TV, but I haven’t found a
way to use that for my purposes. What is the best way to accomplish this
without having to run a long cable through my house? I have wired and
wireless capability at the TV. — Ron Minard.
Ron illustrates one of the annoying problems
with Apple’s gadgets, specifically the Apple TV, iPhone, iPad and iPod
touch — these devices can play only certain types of video files.
Ron has videos on his PC upstairs and he wants
to stream them to his HDTV downstairs through his Apple TV, a hockey
puck-sized box for your television that can wirelessly stream music and
movies to your TV either from a computer or directly from the iTunes
Store. All you need besides the Apple TV is a wireless router.
With the Apple TV, you can stream videos from
your PC to your TV, but only videos formatted to play in iTunes — in
other words, video files with an .m4v, .mp4 or .mov extension.
So, how do you play videos in one format — such as .avi — on a device that cannot play that format?
Here are a few options.
Convert the videos • First, you can convert
all your .avi files into .m4v, .mp4 or .mov files. It’s not horribly
difficult, and it doesn’t cost money.
There’s a free software video converter called
Handbrake that can take those .avi files and transform them into files
that are compatible for iTunes. You simply install the program on your
PC, launch it, choose the video you want to convert, set up how good you
want the video and audio to be, and start the conversion. Depending on
how powerful your computer is, it can convert a one-hour TV episode in
about 20 minutes. You can also set it up to do a batch of video files
one after the other so you don’t have to manually start each video
separately.
Then you import the videos into iTunes. Now you can stream those videos to your TV via Apple TV.