How-To: Stream TV shows to your iPhone & iPod Touch wirelessly with EyeTV

JAN 21 2008

Posted by luna6 11 Comments

This simple how-to is for anyone interested in streaming recorded television shows from their Mac computer (using EyeTV software) to across the internet and onto their iPhone or iPod Touch. With EyeTV 2.5 or higher you can use their PVR software to stream recorded television shows across your local LAN with their “WIFI Access” feature. What’s not well documented is that you can just as easily stream those shows across the internet to your iPhone, iPod Touch, select smartphones and other laptops/desktops. The system requirements to stream shows are :

EyeTV software 2.5 or higher
Mac Computer (preferably Intel based computers).
iPhone or iPod Touch
Router on your local LAN.

*Also having Elgato’s turbo.264 isn’t required, but it will greatly help to speed up the encodes for your mpeg2 tv recordings to the h.264 format, which the iPhone and iPod Touch uses.

STEP 1:
First step is to give your home Mac computer a static ip address if it does not already. Open up System Preferences –> Internet & Network –> Network. Then select Airport or Ethernet depending on whether you use a wireless (Airport) or wired (Ethernet) connection to access the internet. Once that is opened navigate to the TCP/IP tab (for Airport you have to go into the Advanced setting) and under “Configure IPv4″ select from the drop down box “Using DHCP with manual address.” Then in the “IP Address” box type in a permanent ip address for your Mac computer. It’s a good idea to pick something under the 192.168.x.100 range to not interfere with any dynamic addresses handed out by router. As an example give your Mac the IP address of 192.168.0.90 or 192.168.1.90 (depending on which range your router uses).

STEP 2 :
If you are using OS X’s firewall you have to give permission for EyeTV to accept incoming connections. This is done through System Preferences –> Personal –> Security –> Firewall. Once there select click the + box and add the EyeTV program (found in Applications) AND EyeConnect service found in /Library/Application Support/EyeConnect/EyeConnect.app.

STEP 3:
Next step is to enable the “WIFI Access” feature in EyeTV. This is accomplished by opening EyeTV –> Preferences. Once that window is opened, click the check box under “WIFI Access” which reads “Enable access from Safari on iPhone, iPod Touch, or Mac/PC.

STEP 4:
Most likely you have a dynamic ip through your ISP. This creates problems connecting from remote iPhones and iPod Touches because of the ip changes. To solve this we will use dyndns.org to give ourselves a permanent hostname accessible from the internet no matter what IP address your ISP has assigned to your home network.

Go to http://dyndns.org and sign up for their free service. Once logged in to their service select “Dynamic DNS” under free service. Give yourself an easy to remember hostname (example Johneyetv.dyndns.org), then make sure your home computer’s ip address is given to that dyndns account and then install their update client onto your Mac computer (for any future ip changes).

For further information on these steps, read dyndns.org’s howto here

https://www.dyndns.com/services/dns/dyndns/howto.html

and you can download their mac client update program here

https://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/mac.html
STEP 5:
Last step is to forward port 2170 on your home router to your Mac computer. Every brand of router has a different configuration, but they will have “Port Forwarding” available somewhere. Once you find that section input “2170″ next to the TCP/IP section and for the IP address input the static IP Address you selected from STEP 1 (ex 192.168.0.90 or 192.168.1.90).
FINISHED
Once that is done, the setup completion is finished. To view your recorded programs on your iPhone or iPod Touch launch Safari and type in the hostname that you picked in STEP 4, plus port 2170 and the eyetv directory. As an example if your hostname is Johneyetv.dyndns.org then you would input into iPhone’s Safari web browser :

http://Johneyetv.dyndns.org:2170/eyetv

Now you can watch all your recorded shows on your iPhone and iPod Touch. As an added bonus, the shows are streamed to your device, so they don’t take up anymore storage space. You can also opt to download the shows.