HOW TO STREAM MOVIES AND TV SHOWS FROM PC OR MAC TO IPAD

iPad makes for a great productivity tool once you add a keyboard, but the iPad’s form factor makes it a great media consumption machine as well. This can mean YouTube videos, Netflix,video discovery apps, or streaming the hundreds or thousands of movies and TV shows from your PC/Mac.

When we come to the last one, things get a bit tricky. I’ve told you about the fastest ways to transfer videos from PC to the iPad before. But since then VLC has been pulled from the store and Player Xtreme has started charging for every small feature.

What if you just want to stream media from your HTPC or easily download a couple of movies/episodes on your iPad for when you’re out and about?

This being the iPad, there are more than a dozen options available. Below I’ve outlined the easiest and the most cost effective one. After which we’ll dive into the alternatives.

What You’ll Need

• Plex Media Server for Mac/PC
• MCPlayer HD app for iPad (with an optional $0.99 in-app purchase for un-restricted playback)
• PC and iPad connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

Setting Up Plex Media Server On Mac/PC And Importing Stored Media

Plex Media Server helps you make sense of your folder-based media collection. To get started, make sure all your movies are sorted in one folder (each movie in its own sub folder). If your TV shows are sorted by seasons, it’s much better.

Plex scans and organizes your media on its own and adds things like metadata and cover art.

Step 1: Download and install Plex Media Server. It will run in the background. Click the Plex icon from the taskbar and the web based management interface will show up.

Step 2: Follow the setup guide. Give your PC a recognizable name.

Step 3: From the next popup, select the type of media you want to add. You’ll have to do this twice – once for movies and once for TV shows.

Step 4: Select Movies or TV shows and point Plex to the folder that you’ve stored the relevant media in.

Step 5: After all your media is added, press Next and you’re done.

Plex will take a couple of minutes to scan your media.

Using MCPlayer HD To Stream And Download Media Wirelessly

Go to the App Store and download MCPlayer HD on your iPad. It’s a free app that allows you to stream videos from media centers like XBMC, Plex, and other UPnP compatible servers. The app also supports streaming for files shared via Windows Homegroup but for some reason that did not work for me. Plex streaming did.

Open the app and swipe through the opening tutorial.

You’ll now come to the app’s home screen.

Here in the Media Sources page you’ll see a Plex Media Server button. Tapping on it will bring up the contents stored on your Plex Media Server.

From here tap the Video folder and you’ll see options for Movies and TV shows. Tap the relevant folders and you’ll get to the media.

When you open a folder you’ll see that only 5 video files are visible and everything else is locked. This limit can be unlocked by paying $0.99 as an in-app purchase. You can remove ads by paying another $1.99.

Tapping on a video file will start immediate playback. This is where the app really shines. It decodes formats like HD MKV very well. There’s no loss in quality or lag in playback.

The app supports gestures for fast forward/rewind as well.

You don’t need to pay if you’re just going to watch movies: MCPlayer HD unlocks the first 5 media files in a folder. If your movie collection is sorted by one movie in one subfolder (as it should be) there’s only one media file in one folder, which will be unlocked. So unless you plan on streaming TV shows with MCPlayer, HD you don’t really need to pay for the unlock in-app purchase.

Download Media Files To iPad For Offline Use

MCPlayer HD has another great free feature, which is wirelessly downloading media files for later use. When you’re browsing a folder, you’ll see a Download icon (highlighted in the screenshot below).

Tapping it will start the download over Wi-Fi. As this is happening over the network, the speed is insanely fast. Downloading a TV show episode only takes a couple of seconds.

Once downloaded, you’ll find the local media in the Docs section.

Alternatives To MCPlayer HD

The beauty of using Plex Media Server to host your files is that it’s compatible with a lot of receiver apps on many different platforms. If MCPlayer HD doesn’t float your boat, take a look at the options below.

Plex iPad App ($4.99)

Plex has its own streaming app for iOS but the only problem with it is that it’s paid and only works with Plex Media Server.

Infuse 2 ( Free with $6.99 Pro Upgrade)

Infuse 2 is frankly the best looking and probably the most feature rich media player for the iPad. It plays any format you throw at it and streams from every major local and remote server. But the free app is severely limited and unlike MCPlayer HD, the unlock takes a mighty $6.99. If you’re looking for an end-all solution to iPad media player, this might be for you.

Please bring back VLC Player: VLC was probably the best media player for watching and streaming local media. And it was completely free. But it had been playing a game of cat and mouse with the App Store ever since it came out. It’s a shame it had to end this way. Not everything can end like an episode of Tom and Jerry I suppose.

Air Video HD ($2.99) And StreamToMe ($2.99)

Air Video HD and StreamToMe are both pretty similar apps. Both cost the same and both need you to run proprietary server apps on your Mac/PC. When I got my iPod Touch in 2010, Air Video was the best streaming app out there. It’s still good but clearly the world has moved on.

How’s Your Streaming Life?

How do you stream media to the iPad? What kind of different apps do you use? Let us know in the comments below.

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HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OUT OF 1PASSWORD FOR IPHONE

More than ever, security has become one of the biggest concerns among smartphone users. We use our devices to store pretty much every important detail of our lives, including photos, messages, and much more.

In other entries, we have already covered different apps and methods to protect some of this important information, like how to hide individual photos on your iPhone or an app to make groups of them private, or another app that helps you keep your messages secure and encrypted.

In a similar way, today we’ll take a look at 1Password, a popular app that, as its name implies, helps you store and secure all kinds of passwords and login information. The app lets you do much more than that though, like safeguard your notes or even generate your own, super-secure passwords.

Let’s take a better look at this app.

Saving Login and Password Info

This is easily the most popular feature of 1Password. The app specializes in easy and secure storage of all your passwords, which it achieves thanks to both a very friendly UI and its authenticated AES 256-bit encryption respectively.

If you ever tried to remember a dozen different passwords or more, then you know how immensely useful it can be to have all of them stored securely. In fact, once all your data is in 1Password, the only password you’ll have to remember is your Master Password, which you will use to access the app.

  

Note: You can also unlock 1Password with your fingerprint if you have a Touch ID-enabled iPhone.

Once within the app, you are able to access all your passwords and other data in three different ways:

• Categories: Perfect if you have tons of the same kind of information. You can choose from several available categories like Logins, Passwords, Credit Cards and more.
• Favorites: As the name implies, here you can place your most frequently-used passwords and other information for easy and fast access.
• Organize: Feeling a bit more methodical? Too much stuff to handle? This section of 1Password allows you to fine-tune how you categorize your data, letting you create different folders and even add tags to each item.

Less-Known, But Extremely Useful Features

This is where I feel 1Password sets itself apart from similar apps: it’s series of smaller, but tremendously helpful features that add a lot of value to it.

Here are the most important of them.

Vaults

One neat feature of 1Password that not many users know about is the ability to work with ‘vaults’.

  

This lets you organize your passwords and data in macro-categories, such as different vaults for ‘Work’ and ‘Personal’ data, or you could use this to have each family member manage their own passwords independently within the same app. Pretty useful and convenient, especially when paired with the 1Password app for Mac.

Password Creation

What good is a password protection app if it can’t create a good password, right? Well, 1Password more than delivers in this front with a really powerful password creation tool that allows you to fine-tune how your passwords are created.

  

With it, you can create secure alphanumeric passwords that contain as many digits, letters (and even symbols) as you wish, and that are as that long (or as short) as you want them to be.

Secure Browser

This feature is tied very closely to the rest of the app, and makes for the safest browsing experience if you don’t trust other browsers‘ privacy/incognito modes. Also, since the browser is located within 1Password itself, your login information gets filled in even faster.

I personally think this is a great way to quickly browse sensitive information, like your personal email account or your bank’s website.

Conclusion

Overall, while 1Password might not be the cheapest app out there (it comes with in-app purchases), the security it provides plus the additional features it carries make it a must-have for anyone. Even more so if you consider that just about everyone nowadays stores sensitive information in a variety of places online.

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HOW TO CREATE A GIF SLIDESHOW ON IPHONE AND IPAD

If emojis are the text for the internet generation, GIFs are our videos. We use GIFs to say things we can’t in textual form. Here at Guiding Tech we use GIFs to better explain software. Some use GIFs to make a point or tell a story.

But GIFs are in a category that’s all their own. There is no Spotify or Netflix for GIFs – no place that plays them one after the other. What if you want to create a slideshow of GIFs you downloaded from the internet or made yourself? With the GifJung app for iOS, now you can.

How To Download And Save GIFs

I’ve previously talked about downloading and sending GIFs from the iPhone, and for that, the GIFwrapped app is still the best out there. It has everything from reaction GIFs to pop culture ones. Just search for a GIF and save it to your device.

 

Tap the Explore icon to search for a GIF. Next, tap the GIF thumbnail for a preview. Now tap theShare button on the top right, then choose Share image, and from the default iOS 8 share sheet select Save image to save the GIF to your device.

How To Record Your Own GIFs

The easiest way to create GIFs from your phone itself is an app called Camoji. You can use it to take 5 seconds of video and the app will process it and create a looping GIF that you can save to your device or share it to any social network.

Cool Tip: A great alternative to this is the 5 Seconds App, where you can create awesome animations straight from your iPhone.

Using Mac/PC to create a more complicated GIF: If you’re looking to create a GIF out of a video or a movie yourself, you might need to use desktop or web apps to do so. You can use software such as Photoshop to create a GIF as well.

How To Create A GIF Slideshow With GifJung

But let’s get back on track. On your iPhone or iPad, download GifJung and start it up. It will detect GIFs stored on your device automatically.

Tap the Play button on the top right to create a slideshow and From Selected GIF select the GIFs you want in your slideshow and tap Start.

The GIF playback will start one by one. Each GIF will play once and instead of looping again, the app will switch to the next GIF. Yup, it’s that easy.

How Do You Plan To Use GifJung?

How do you plan to use this app? A slideshow of funny GIFs mixed with reaction GIFs perhaps? Let us know in the comments below.

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