Tap your data! Welcome the Amahi mobile app, say hello to Amahi Anywhere!

It’s been quiet and productive in the Amahi labs lately!

Today we are proud to announce an exciting new feature for our latest edition, Amahi 7.  It’s the easiest way yet to access your data with mobile devices, the Amahi iOS client, and a matching app for your HDA that we call Amahi Anywhere. As the name implies, this app and the client gives you the ability to easily and securely access the data stored on your Amahi HDA from your mobile devices.

All it takes is a one-click install app on your Amahi HDA, and a client on your iPad or iPhone and you will be able to access files, stream movies, music, and more. Amahi for iOS is available now in the Apple App Store. A client for Android devices is coming soon!

Features of the iOS app:Amahi Mobile App for iOS

  • No setup, no port-forwarding, no VPN needed!
  • AirPlay support to play to other devices like Apple TV and XBMC
  • Intuitive, iOS 7 style interface
  • Embedded VLC iOS codebase in collaboration with VideoLAN team
  • Support for most popular media codes and containers like MKV, MPEG-4,
  • Embedded VLC player (version 2.1.0), with dynamic selection of tracks, subtitles and aspect ratio
  • … and more

If you are wondering what is the magic? It’s the magic of Open Source FLOSS Software!

The Amahi team has created a SPDY proxy library and sample clients that makes all of the above possible. And we made it Open Source! The SPDY prococol is on track for becoming the 2.0 version of the HTTP protocol. Follow the link for all the technical details.

What’s more exciting? We’re working on back-porting Amahi Anywhere for Amahi 6 (on Ubuntu) and also on an Android client! Update: Amahi Anywhere is available for Amahi 6 as of December 24 2013. Merry Christmas!

To learn more about the new features and everything else that is going on with Amahi, tune in to this Wednesday’s episode of The TWiT Network’s “FLOSS Weekly” show who will feature the Amahi team lead Carlos Puchol!

Update: watch the FLOSS video or listen to the audio of the interview in this FLOSS weekly page.

Hosts Aaron Newcomb and Dan Lynch will grill Carlos about what is new with Amahi and what is on the horizon.

To catch it live tune Wednesday December 4th at 8:30am PST/11:30 EST/17:30 CES, or catch it recorded in the TWiT page!

Crank up your media with Videos5 and .. GoogleTV!? (no permission required)

Word of Videos5 was leaked early in its development and, since then, it has been one of the most requested Apps in the history of Amahi. Today we’re happy to release Videos5 and the all-new Gallery 3 live. Two truly powerful apps!

Videos5 lets you stream your media to devices that can support HTML5, like the iPhone, iPad and iPod, Android devices and many others. It even lets you easily queue your media for transcoding to the format appropriate for streaming*.

Videos5 is expected to play well with the much buzzed about Google TV devices (Logitech revue, Sony TV). While everyone is steering people to watch things from the internet … how about watching your media in your screen(s)?!

Here is a quick video tour of the Videos5 app being used from an iPad:

Gallery 3

Gallery 3 is the latest from The Gallery ProjectGallery 2 has been one of the most popular one-click apps in Amahi. So its successor is highly anticipated!

Gallery is the premier open source web based photo album organizer. It gives you an intuitive way to blend photo management seamlessly into your own website whether you’re running a small personal site, large community site, or you’re just running it off of your HDA internally within your own network!

Back to Videos5

Have you ever had that one movie, the one you love, but is just too big for your phone or iPad? Now you can stream your videos to your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad or browser (and easily transcode it, if necessary)!

Videos5 allows you to stream your MPEG-4 (H.264) videos using any HTML5-compliant browser: Safari, Chrome & Android as well as the new versions of Firefox and Opera.

For each file that isn’t ready to stream, Videos5 will allow you to queue it for background transcoding. It even supports thumbnails. If your Movies share contains folder.jpg and filename.tbn files (also used by XBMC), those will be used in Videos5. Check the Videos5 wiki page for the juicy details.

We anticipate that you are now itching to go try out this new app for yourselves! Videos5 is now live!

As a pioneering leader in digital home management we are proud to bring you these two new apps. So get out there try it and rejoice in the wonders in which Amahi strives to bring you! Both of these apps deserve a Hollywood style Red Carpet Premier!  Flash! Glamour & Glitz!

Amahi is about making networking simple! Because it’s your network!

Cheers!

The Amahi Team

* Transcoding not available yet in the Amahi Plug Edition

DLNA me, Baby!

As you know, in addition of all the dozens of app updates (follow in real time @ app updates page), we have been discussing how to improve the media server features of Amahi for a bit.

We have:DLNA

  • AmahiTunes (being fixed at this time) as an audio server for iTunes/Rhythmbox
  • uShare, which is a UPnP server and delivers streamed content to the Xbox, the PS3 and other clients
  • Squeezebox Server, to stream your music to a wide range of Logitech devices
  • As well, of course, Amahi has one of the best share management systems for Samba, which you can use with the most excellent VLC, MediaPortal or XBMC front ends (as well as many other players).

In that front, we now proudly introduce the Amahi DLNA media server. It’s a port to Amahi of the excellent MiniDLNA server, released by an employee of Netgear.

This app is in Beta (active users enrolled in the tester program have access to test it), and so far we hear that it is working really well for even full 1080p content across a variety of clients like Xbox, PS3 and even thin hardware players like the WD TV Live or the Asus O!Play Air or even the Sony Bravia, Samsung TVs with DLNA clients in them!

Humphrey BogartThis server has the advantage of periodically detecting new files (as opposed to uShare), and it supports more media formats, so it’s virtually maintenance-free!

We wanted to drop a quick “kudos” to all testers who are helping with it!

So, DLNA me Baby! We look forward to releasing it live for everyone in the community so that you can play your media again and again!