Latest Apple 4.3 Update Changes Everything for the Home Theater

by Loren Paul

All Hail the New Age of The iPad / Apple TV / Airplay Video App Updates (the Saviour of the Home Theater)

Update: 14 March 2011- I just learnt that Inmethod, (the great folks behind Air Video) has an update pending with Apple Apps that fixes at least one minor issue with the iPad and AirPlay.

Folks may not realize it yet but things will never be the same.

Now you can use your iPad , Apple TV, and 3^rd Party Apps like Air Video to access your entire movie library with ease with the updated Airplay.

Back when the iPad was introduced, there was already a challenge in the home theater world.

How best to make use or build the perfect home theatre / media library (and affordably). It required only a few parts;

1) A Computer for downloading content (all legal of course).

2) A lot of storage (best served by a NAS storage device)

3) A media extender connected to your projector or big screen TV

4) Everything in between to make it all work.

Ignoring for a moment item 4, the media extender was a hard one 6 months ago. Some used an Xbox others a Mac Mini, to connect both to the TV and the NAS (media storage). However the interface for the media extender back to the media storage library was not perfect. The Xbox would sync with some items and not others. Using a Mac Mini was near perfect using a computer screen GUI is not perfect either.
The iPad offered another opportunity; in that you could load it full of media then with Airplay on the Apple TV you could stream it direct to your big screen TV.
The Apple TV (2^nd generation) was also good but limited. It offers a great simple interface, but has a big draw back as it doesn’t talk perfectly with a NAS unit and when it does doesn’t like non Mac formats (like avi, or wmv). Jail-breaking the apple TV got past some of this but again offered other challenges.
Well with the introduction of iOS 4.3, Apple has done perhaps the unimaginable.
They have offered the last piece of the puzzle, the golden chalice if you will, that now allows third party apps (like the amazing Air Video App), that allow the iPad to be used as a control device for the Media Library.

Those with the first generation iPad could do a lot worse than keeping it as part of the media centre and buy a 2^nd one for normal use .. just saying.

Air Video is a 3rd party app that streams video from your own Windows or Mac Home or Office Network your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch either wirelessly or over the Internet via http://www.inmethod.com/

On 9 March free updates were available for the iPad, Apple TV, iTunes (Mac and PC), and the Air Video app