Streaming Videos from a USB External Hard Drive to Your TV

This may seem a bit convoluted, but it provides a very efficient way of streaming video content from a USB hard drive to a TV in a second room.

My criteria:

• All content to be stored on an external hard drive
• Although I use iTunes for most multimedia playback and purchases I didn’t want to import all my content into iTunes.
• Streaming content must happen in the background and not slow down the computer it is attached to

After looking at different options I decided to stream from my MacBook to my iPad 1 and then connect the iPad to the TV.

In my office:

• 1 TB Seagate external hard drive
• MacBook running Air Video server
• Airport extreme WIFI router

In my living room:

• TV
• iPad connected by AV Composite connector to TV and running Air Video

To test out the video quality I watched full HD 1080p videos playing  full screen on the iPad (TV).  The quality was excellent and there were no incidents of buffering.  Encouraged by this I examined if running Air Video server would slow down my MacBook.  There appeared to be no noticeable lag of my MacBook at all.

I would thoroughly recommend Air Video as a very credible media streaming solution for home multimedia.  Remote login options are available but I have not explored this yet.