Jan
21
2008
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.
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Comments
10 Comments so far
“1 George Mitchell Says: January 21, 2008
How can I do this on a windows xp media computer?”
TVersity
Can I stream videos over WAN, instead of going through the internet. I can’t stand the VERY slow loading times of the internet videos, since the videos i converted to mp4 to play on my ipod touch are all like 400mb.
How do I do this on a pc?
Fantastic little tutorial.
I’m what you’d probably call an advanced Mac user but even so, the thought of fiddling with routers, firewalls and DNS entries doesn’t usually ‘float my boat’ and I tend to steer clear.
The potential to gain remote eyeTV access was enough to tempt me in and I seem to have it all set up within about 45 mins. Hard to test for sure but if I turn the wifi on my iPhone off it now navigates to the ‘new’ eyeTV homepage via Edge without a problem (though it won’t play items over Edge, of course).
Hit a small stumble on the port forwarding but I highly recommend http://www.portforward.com who had a step by step guide for my router and made it all make sense.
One slight niggle (in no way aimed at your fine run-through) is that the link that worked previously for me at home (ie: on the wifi LAN) now appears dead when I attempt to access on the iPhone. Is your DNS streaming fix a ‘one way’ solution which renders home LAN access defunct or is there a simple workaround I’m too dumb to figure out?!
Again, great work and many thanks.
Ed
About the firewall: To be on the safe side sure it’s safer to have it on. I’ll probably get nailed by security guru’s for saying this, but… if your mac is always at home (not a notebook) and you are behind a router, then for incoming connections the only vulnerable connections you have are the ports you have forwarded to the mac. So I would say its pretty safe.
Then again if you were to download some software with malicious outgoing connections that could cause problems as well. So yes its better to have the firewall, but under the circumstances listed earlier, your relatively safe without it.
If that Mac is a notebook and you use it on other networks then it’s more risky and you should definitely figure out your firewall problems.
Thanks again for your post and comments. I hope my findings help others as well.
I can tell you I have been successful now and want to add a few tidbits of my trials.
First off, I can get this to work both in and out of my house (so on my LAN and somewhere else via WiFi and Edge! The one trick for me, was in Step #2. If I set “Allow All Incoming Connections”, everything works. If I try either of the other two (even with the Settings described above), it doesn’t work.
Also, I have not done Step #4 either. I did, however, get my “Public IP” from http://www.whatismyipaddress.com…I know that since my Cable Modem probably will change my IP at some point, Step 4 would be good, but for right now, I’ll be fine. So, when I’m at home or on the road, I put in the Public IP:2170/eyetv/ and I’m in!
My one last question is how bad is it to leave my Firewall open to all connections, because I could not get this to work otherwise.
Thanks again.
To get it to work on your local LAN only, you could do just steps 2 and 3. Once you got that then try to set it up again for outside connnections meaning follow steps 1 - 5.
Hey man,
Thanks for putting up this post, great info. I’m a little stuck though. I’ve done everything except Step 4 and I can’t get it to work. Now I know, that following all the steps would probably help, but I figure, if I’m on the same local net, I should be able to hit my computer’s IP address and not have to worry about the Cable Modem’s IP? Perhaps I’m way off? I’ve read a bunch on this and about half mention the dyndns stuff, so I thought I might slide by…
I’m on 10.5.1 PPC, AirPort Extreme, El Gato 250, EyeTV 3.0 and Cable Modem. I’d love to use my iPhone away from home to check in on some shows :)
Any help would be great, even if it just says, “Do Step 4″.
Thanks!
If your question is serious….to be continued tomorrow (let me think about it).
How can I do this on a windows xp media computer?