I bought an iPad a while back with intention of developing an Online Time Clock MTS client for it. However one look at Objective-C and I ran screaming for the hills so that particular ambition was put on hold. This has relegated the iPad to being used for browsing the web while watching TV, playing the odd car racing game, and teaching our kids their times tables. I must also confess to the guilty pleasure lying in bed late at night and using the iPad with the ABC Iview app to catch up on episodes of Time Team and Good Game. This was only the real video I watched on the device as converting AVI files to watch looked painful enough to not be worth the effort, so I’d never done it.

Then last night I was poking around the App store and found that the VLCStreamer app has been re-listed. Previously it had been listed as a free app but Apple (for whatever reason) had nuked it and it was no longer available. VLCStreamer allows you to stream video files from your computer and view them on your iPad. Installing the app on the iPad was simple (as installing all apps is). To serve up video files to the iPad required me to download an install the VLC Streamer program on a computer which serves up the video files. Once this was done I could see the PC name from within the VLCStreamer app on the iPad and could navigate to the folder that contained all my video files. I selected one and hey presto I was watching the video! Setup took all of 2 minutes.

To me the iPad is the stuff of science fiction anyway, but VLCStreamer simply takes it to another level completely. Highly recommended to anyone with an iPad and digital media library.

Footnote: Reading about MonoTouch and developing iPad applications in .NET has resurrected the idea of an iPad client.