One of the main reasons I only got the 8Gb touch was that I was optimistic that I'd find a way of streaming video an music to it from my PowerBook over the home airport network.
There's an application called
Dot.Tunes that claims to be able to that very thing, and with a plug in called Dot.Touch it looked like they had it a GUI for the touch and it looked quite good. Unfortunately for your US$20 you don't get very much (IMHO) - the interface is a bit choppy, you can't play more than one track at a time (well if you can I haven't worked it out!?), and the most disappointing bit was that movies in your iTunes library (correctly converted etc) would crash Dot.Tunes when it tried to stream. Music videos seemed to be okay (ie Thriller) but proper films never worked (even though the site claimed it did). I did try different sized films, down to 350Mb, but still they killed the app.
So the search continued until I came across these two blogs...
http://embraceware.com/blog/2007/09/...o-your-iphone/
http://pixelcity.com/iphone-streaming-music/
(the first courtesy of tuaw)
So after a bit of trial and error and Terminal:
1. In your System Prefs, go to Sharing, Services, and tick "Personal Web Sharing" to open it, and keep note of the IP address
2. Open Terminal (it's in the Utilities folder in Apps - don't worry it's not that bad!)
3. Type the following...
cd /Library/WebServer/Documents/
and then press Enter
4. Now you need to create a link to your Movies folder that's in your iTunes library. Type the following...
ln -s/ Volumes/Machintosh HD/users/john/Music/iTunes/Movies Movies
and then press Enter -
NOTE the path of your iTunes folder may differ slightly, but from the above example you should be able to work it out!
5. Now to give some more permissions to the Music folder...
chmod 755 ~/Music
and then press Enter
6. Now you can test this on your Mac based browser first by go to 10.0.1.2/movies, or whatever the IP address is from point 1. You should then end up looking at a text directory of the contents of the movies folder.
7. Go to Safari on the iPod touch, navigate to the same IP address (including the "movies" bit) that you just tried above. Select one of your movies and press to play. Et voilΰ....!
I'm trying it out with Fearless (from my own DVD!) and it seems fine - no stutter on the touch, but it causes a bit of havoc with my Airport Express output to my speakers via airtunes, so I don't think I should play iTunes through my external speakers and watch a film on the touch at the same time!! (looking at the network traffic it was trying to push out about 500kb/s)
I'm hoping Dot.Tunes do some more work on their plugin for the music to get continuous play, but for the time being this allows me to leave the films off the iPod touch, unless of course I want to watch this away from home - then I'm not sure how reliable the connection will be, and then you'll probably have to get some DNS address thingy, etc- far too complicated for me right now!!
Not sure how much mileage y'all get out of this, or how useful it'll really be, but it's better than a kick in the teeth
