Turn your Mac into an Airplay Data Server with AirFlick

Last week Erica Sadun created AirPlayer, a program that allowed streaming of video from your iOS device to your Mac. Today, Erica has released AirFlick, which allows streaming of data outside iTunes.
Here’s how it works:

AirFlick offers the potential of real-time transcoding of otherwise unsupported file types into Apple TV-compatible data. It also allows you to open videos located on the Internet by pasting a URL and clicking the play button. I was able to watch a number of Internet Archive (archive.org) mp4 videos on a big screen TV by browsing that website, selecting URLs, and opening them with AirFlick.

AirFlick works by transforming your Mac into a web browser, the same way AirPlay works on your iPhone or other iOS device. For Mac-based files, AirFlick tells your Apple TV to connect to a local URL and serves the data that the Apple TV plays back. So long as those files are in a supported format such as mp4, m4v, mp3, etc, the Apple TV can read and display the file data.

Video demo below:

Kudos to Erica for coming up with all these tweaks for iDevice users. Well done!

Click here to download AirFlick–it’s in beta. Use at your own risk as always.

[TUAW]