Stream Your Media Library

Stream and share large media libraries from a network drive to iOS devices.

- Hollin Jones

We’re moving rapidly, some may even say we are being dragged, towards a future without wires.

It’s true that you can still connect your iPad or a hard drive to your Mac using a cable, but Apple has been encouraging us all towards wireless means of data transfer for quite some time now. But while services like iCloud Drive and Apple Music are great, they don’t suit everyone’s needs. For one thing, they often cost money. Also, they’re general-purpose storage that’s lacking in convenience for storing large movie collections in the cloud. The problem is even more acute with iOS devices, which have much smaller storage capacities than Macs. A few HD movies will soon fill up even a 32GB iPad.

So, if you have a large music or movie collection, you’ll want a way to play that media over your network to your iOS devices, ideally without using iTunes on your Mac as the hub through which it’s served. Systems like Plex (free, plex.tv) enable this, but they can be fairly complex to set up. An easier solution is to use Remote File Manager, an iOS app that’s designed to give you direct access to storage wirelessly so you can copy, manage and stream all kinds of media across your network.

The free version of Remote File Manager is limited to one device, while the inexpensive full version (£3.99) enables access to multiple drives. The great thing is that the app doesn’t require you to sign up to any kind of online accounts or install any special software on your local drives, only the app on your iOS device. It is purely and simply a file viewer and manager, providing access to the files on your drives on your local network and in the cloud using an interface that’s simple, powerful and perhaps more elegant than macOS’s Finder.

A Personal Media Server