There is a great free way to get all your media at your fingertips. Usually your iPad and iPhone don’t have the entirety of your media collection rather it is kept on your PC or Mac. If you want to enjoy your movies or music on your more portable devices you would need to transfer the content to your iPad or iPhone. There should be a better solution and there is. We will show you how to stream to iPhone & iPad with VLC and Plex from your PC or Mac.
Plex Media Server is a great free piece of software that is available for both PC and Mac. You will need to install it on your device and it will automatically scan all your media and categorise it. Not only that Plex will also fetch metadata about your music, movies and t.v shows from the internet in the background.
You can get Plex from here [Plex website]. After the download completes install Plex and open the app. On the menu bar in Mac or in the system tray on Windows you will see an arrow. This icon can be used to launch the Plex Server interface, right click on it and click ‘Media Manager’. In the window that opens click ‘Add a section’ link in My Library. Select the type of media you want to add and navigate to the location where the said media is located. Click save to make Plex spring into action and start categorising media and fetching metadata.
On your iOS device you will need to get VLC which you can get from here [iTunes App Store]. Open the VLC on your iOS device and tap the traffic cone icon in the top right and then tap on ‘Local Network’. To stream media you need to have both devices on the same Wi-Fi network. Once you tap ‘Local Network’ you will see Plex Media Server listed in the UPnP section. Tapping on it will bring up all the media in your library. You might face some trouble locating video files as there are multiple levels of nesting.
Now you should be set to stream to iPhone & iPad with VLC and take procrastination to the next level. Also learn how you can stream movies and shows for free using MovieBox.