AirVideo Server under Linux

AirVideo is a Client/Server-Mediaplayer, which allows you to stream videos directly from your PC to your iPhone. Its server software started as Windows-/Mac-only but now there's also a Linux server module available, too.

All details are explained in their user forums.

1. download the customized version of FFmpeg from: http://www.inmethod.com/air-video/licenses.html (use the 2.2.5 version!) and unpack it to some directory
2. install the following packages: libmp3lame-dev, libfaad-dev, libx264-dev (0.svn20100115-0.0~kkstemp1 from Stéphane Marguet's PPA!), mpeg4ip-server, git-core, pkg-config
3. change to the directory to where you have unpacked FFmpeg
4. run:

   ./configure --enable-pthreads --disable-shared --enable-static --enable-gpl --enable-libx264 --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --disable-decoder=aac
   make

5. after the build is complete, download the AirVideoServerLinux.jar and test.properties from this posting (UPDATE: Newer version)
6. modify the test.properties and fix the paths to the 3 tools and your video directory:
   • path.ffmpeg should point to your just compiled ffmpeg-binary
   • path.mp4creator is /usr/bin/mp4creator
   • path.faac is /usr/bin/faac
   • folders format is: <label1>:<path1>,<label2>:<path2>,…,<labelN>:<pathN>
   • leave the other options as they are
7. finally you can run:

   java -jar AirVideoServerLinux.jar test.properties

8. manually add the server (by its IP!) to AirVideo on your iPhone
9. Have fun!

To autostart AirVideoServer upon bootup, you can use UpStart which is the default way in Karmic Koala.

Just create a file /etc/init/airvideo.conf with these contents:

airvideo.conf

start on runlevel [2345]
stop on shutdown
respawn

exec sudo -H -n -u mbirth /usr/bin/java -jar /opt/AirVideoServer/AirVideoServerLinux.jar /opt/AirVideoServer/test.properties

This will tell UpStart to run the server process as user mbirth upon reaching one of the runlevels 2-5 and stop the server when the system shuts down. respawn tells it to restart the server if it crashed.

You can also control it manually by doing

sudo start airvideo

or

sudo stop airvideo

jcheshire pointed out how to add AirVideo to the avahi-daemon, so that it is automatically recognized by the clients. Read more in the AirVideo forums.