iPad Buzz Player Streams and Converts Movies From Network Storage

 Buzz Player can stream movies in any format to your iPad, from anywhere

Buzz Player is an iPad (and iPhone and Android) app that lets you stream video from pretty much any device on your network. That means you can watch movies stored on a network-attached hard drive without switching on a computer. It’s pretty amazing.

There are other solutions for streaming video to the iPad. Air Video takes any file on your Mac or PC and converts it on-the-fly to an iPad-friendly format, but requires a computer to do it. Another app named FileBrowser will stream movies direct from, say, a Time Capsule, but they need to be H.264 MP4 files. This probably means you’ll have to convert the files first.

What Buzz Player does is connect directly to any SMB or FTP server. From there, you can browse the folders until you meet a movie you’d like to play. Tap it and you can choose to copy the file to your iPad, or just play it. The movies starts right away, and plays stutter free in seemingly any format.

And I mean any format. Not only will it play H.264 MP4 and WMV in a range of containers (AVI, MOV, OGG, DIVX and more), it will handle things like Sorensen, Real Video and Theora. It also supports pretty much any sound format, and allows you to connect over the local network or even via 3G using most networking protocols. Buzz Player even supports subtitles, and lets you tweak not only their appearance but to offset their timing — handy for getting things to sync up.

It’s not all great, though. The interface is ugly, unintuitive and looks more like an open-source Linux project than a polished iPad app. Once you get past this, though, it’s easy enough to use.

I also get some crashing. Every time I hit the “X” in the top left corner to back out of the current movie or section of the app, it dies. When playing movies and working with the network, though, it is stable.

You really need to read the iTunes description to see just how much this thing can do, but let me just add one more point. You can also load up the app with movies via iTunes, just like any other video player. That way, you have pretty much every possibility covered.

Buzz Player is just $4 for the iPad, $3 for the iPhone and ￥499 (around $6) for Android.

Buzz Player [Bugun Software]

Buzz Player for iPad [iTunes]

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Making Movies on iPad, iPhone

KOMPAS.com - The iPad is a content-consumption device. The Macintosh, in all its variations - tower, desktop or notebook - is for content creation. We know that because Steve Jobs said so.

Either he has changed his thinking or iPads 1 and 2 have developed minds of their own and want to be creation devices. And, indeed, they are.

The iPad's mind, in this sense, is the army of developers who have crammed the iTunes App Store with apps of a creative nature. And Apple has been doing it, too.

Last week we talked about GarageBand, a creative application on the iPad; it's great for making music to use for almost anything, from backgrounding an iMovie to keeping neighbours awake.

Thus we come to the mobile version of iMovie, which first appeared on the iPhone 4 and the latest iPod Touch. Small though those screens are, some remarkable work is being done on them, not only shooting movie footage but also editing it on a timeline only a fraction of the width of a finger.

YouTube has heaps of little amateur movies made on iPhone 4s, some of really nice quality. See examples at tinyurl.com/3rcdjqu, tinyurl

.com/3s7fz6l and tinyurl.com/437y53b (high-def views from the London Eye Ferris wheel).

But Park Chan-Wook, one of South Korea's most famous movie directors, gets the gong for shooting a commercial movie, Night Fishing, on an iPhone 4. A mysterious trailer for this chilling 30-minute horror production is at tinyurl.com/3jg663d.

Park used two iPhone 4s as his main cameras but used some accessory lenses placed over the phone's cameras. The shoot took 10 days, had 80 people in the crew and cost $130,000 and presumably was not edited on the phone. How it fared in the cinemas we have yet to discover but it could have recouped its cost simply on curiosity value.

Another HD movie made and this time edited in iMovie HD on an iPhone 4 is Rideshare, made by American Donovan Cook. It hasn't made the mainstream but it got a go in the Buffalo Niagara Film Festival this month. See it on YouTube.

Now, had these people used iMovie on the iPad 2, things could have been even better. As apps go, iMovie is a real stunner. If you have iMovie ($5.99 from iTunes) on your iPhone 4, the upgrade to the iPad 2 version is free.

Given the iPad 2's bigger screen, Apple's engineers were able to develop a new and better interface that, while not a match for iMovie on the Mac, is notably better than the iPhone 4.

Editing by tapping and stroking the screen with one's finger is surprisingly accurate and easy; very intuitive. Tap a frame in the browser under the edit screen, drag to define the clip you want, slide it into the timeline and tap to play it in the review panel. If you don't like it, tap again and drag the clip out of the timeline and either back to the browser or into the trash.

Similar sleight-of-finger gestures are used to add video or still photographs shot on the iPad 2 or imported from iPhoto to the browser, from where they can be added to your movie. Music is available from the iTunes library on the iPad (or make your own in GarageBand) and titles and voice-over commentary are also easy to include.

A basic transition is added automatically between video clips or photos but it can be changed easily via a drop-down menu selected by pinching on the transition.

Video or stills shot on a digital camera or an iPhone may be added by using an Apple iPad camera connection kit ($35).

A good help menu is available from a button on the screen and another button opens a range of sharing options for YouTube, Facebook and other popular "look-at-me" networks.

Overall, iMovie on the iPad 2 is great fun, surprisingly powerful and, while there is a learning curve, it is short and smooth; mostly commonsense use of your fingers.

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