Monday, September 13, 2010

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere [Downloads]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5635092/zumocast-streams-your-media-just-about-anywhere

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere Similar to Libox, ZumoCast turns your Mac or Windows PC into a media streaming server that you can access through any web browser or iOS device.

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere

ZumoCast is really easy to setup. After a quick signup process, you'll just need to select media folders for ZumoCast to scan for relevant media types (music, movies, etc.). It does this quickly, so you'll be able to log in to your account on zumocast.com and access all your files.

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere

From there, find a song or a video you want to play and click on it. It'll play back from your computer, regardless of where you are. This is, of course, limited by your connection's upload speed and your machine's speed. Even with a Core i7 and 8GB of RAM, CPU usage was a little ridiculous:

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere In addition to streaming to and from Mac and Windows machines, you can also use ZumoCast to send video to your iOS devices. Browsing is a pretty simple experience, similar to what you'll find on their site (or really any standard file browser, for that matter). Again, ZumoCast relies on your computer to convert the video for iOS-friendly playback, so expect the same sort of limitations here. I found that MPEG4/H.264 content tended to stream more smoothly than anything else, whether it was to the web or to an iOS device. While this isn't all that surprising, the difference was pretty drastic. Other file types struggled quite a bit while MPEG4/H.264 didn't struggle at all.

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About AnywhereIf you are having any issues, ZumoCast has a download button. This is just pretty nice to have in general. If you want to download any of your media to your iOS device, you can just press the download button and you can start queuing up clips.

Zumocast Streams Your Media Just About Anywhere
Important note: that's the awesome review of Star Wars Episode II depicted in the screenshot, not the actual movie (thankfully).

Zumocast is available now and works on both Mac OS X and Windows, plus your iPhone and iPad.