OSX video streaming the easy way
The problem
For a while now, i have been searching for a way to stream videos from my living room’s Mac Mini to my other Macs across the house. Especially to my laptop (or in the future to my tablet) when i’m laying in bed. Yes, i know i’m lazy, but one has to take advantage of technology, right? 
The problem is that i never found a nice enough way to do it. I tried streaming through VLC, but unfortunately the wireless network seems not to be enough to cope with the amount of data. Also, it’s a bit cumbersome to have to setup the stream every time i want to watch a movie in bed. I looked into whether XBMC or Plex would do the trick and, although there are some built in server capabilities, i was never able to make it work for my needs.
The solution
Enter StreamToMe and ServeToMe. Both applications are available in the Mac Appstore (they also have iPhone, iPod, and iPad apps) and allow seamless video streaming across Macs. Painless. You define the folders you want to share in the server and the client gets to browse them, complete with video thumbnails. Extremely cool and practical, especially because they convert the videos on the fly so it plays smoothly even across 3G networks 
From their website:
“Files are live-transcoded into the native format for your device so you don’t need to pre-convert your media. Adaptive bitrates mean that you can stream over WiFi or 3G.”
Now if i could just get an android version
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Why didn't Plex serve your needs?
I have Plex (client+server) installed on my mac mini, which manages all my movies and tv shows.. then all I had to do was install the client on my macbook pro, iphone, ipad, etc… and the streaming just worked.
The beautiful part of all this is that when I watch a tv show or movie on any device it shows up as "watched" on all the others, making my life so much easier…
Oh, you can also start watching a movie on your laptop and when you go to your TV it will ask you if you want to resume from xx:xx… isn't that just awesome?
Plex felt really sluggish on my mac mini (and it's a 2010 mac mini – the new one). Besides, i don't really like the whole itunes-like interface for the server part.
These two apps actually encode on the fly, which makes it possible to even stream movies via 3G to your phone!!!
I do love the "watched" and "resume from" features, but i also get that with XBMC (Plex forked from it, remember?
). And since i usually only use streaming to watch stuff i already watched, the combination of these 3 is optimal for me 