IFlicks 2 lets you watch iTunes videos on Apple TV without any problems

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

The most inconvenient thing about Apple TV is watching movies that are not in your library. I think the owners of the console will agree with me. But uploading your own video to iTunes is not so easy: the media combine does not support all video formats. But the question needs to be solved somehow?

I have already written about various applications that can play videos from your Mac on Apple TV even without the participation of iTunes. Among them, it is worth noting a very good and more advanced, but expensive one. By the way, in the comments to the review of the latter, I was prompted by another way to view content on a set-top box from Apple - iFlicks. I began to try it.

The main difference between iFlicks 2 and the applications mentioned above is that there is no need for a smartphone or tablet as an intermediary between your computer and the set-top box connected to the TV. The program is installed only on Mac without additional applications for iOS.

The main purpose of iFlicks is to automatically add video files to your iTunes library. But the application is not just another converter from various formats to those supported by iTunes. With iFlicks, you can download movie and TV series covers, actor details, and other information about a movie, including descriptions for movies and TV shows. And most importantly, all this is done automatically.

In the same way as with Plex and AirVideo HD, you must set a watched folder that the application will constantly watch. Once it finds content that meets the conditions, it will start processing and uploading it to iTunes. You choose the processing rules in the iFlicks settings. The system is very convenient and has a huge number of options for setting rules, and the principle of their creation is very similar to working in Automator.

Set the conditions: keep track of the folder with films, when new ones appear, upload covers and descriptions, and then convert and add them to your library. When finished, delete the original files so as not to clog up hard disk space.

The only drawback of the application is the conversion process itself. If you prefer to watch movies in the highest quality available, this will affect their size, and therefore the time to convert one video format to another supported by Apple's application. On the 2014 Mac mini we tested with an SSD drive, a standard 40-minute episode takes about 12-15 minutes to run. On the one hand, not so long, but on the other, it's just an episode …

In any case, you already have a choice: use "intermediaries" on iOS and not wait for the conversion, or gradually distill from one format to another, but start the video directly from the set-top box using only the remote control.

Which method is preferable for you and why? Let us know in the comments!