Here’s a hint I found in pieces on the web. Predominantly on the Embraceware blog. It took me a while to find all the right pieces and examples to get it to work, so here it is in full.
The result is you can access your entire iTunes media library from your iPhone or iPod Touch by using your device’s browser and Wi-Fi connection.
As presented here it should work on most Macs, though some bits may need changing if you’ve done other things to your default configuration.
Bold bits are what you type, exactly, except for the orange bit where you need to substitute your own login name. It’s easiest to copy and paste the text from here. Note that step 5 is a single line, though it probably splits over two lines as you see it here. Copy and paste should take care of that.
- Open System Preferences and click on “Sharing”
- Enable “Personal Web Sharing” and then note the address shown as “Your computer’s website:”. You’ll need this later.
- Start Terminal. You’ll find it in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder.
- Type cd /Library/WebServer/Documents
- Type ln -s “/Volumes/Macintosh HD/users/yourusername/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music” iTunes
- Type sudo chmod 755 ~/Music
- Enter the same password you do when doing system updates.
- Type exit to quit the terminal.
- On your iPhone or iPod Touch, start Safari and enter the address noted in step 2, and append iTunes to the end so it looks something like this: http://192.168.1.10/iTunes
- That’s it!
You’ll see the directory structure of your iTunes library – including movies – laid out before your eyes. Simply tap on a directory link to go down a level, use the back button to go back a level and tap on a movie or song or podcast to stream it to your device!
As a bonus, when playing movies you can rotate your device as you wish between portrait or landscape and the movie will rotate to match – something you can’t do with movies loaded onto your device. (Not sure why you’d want to, but there you go!)