Of course, there is Simplify Media for the iPhone and iPod Touch now ... so this article is not quite as useful as before. But you can still use TVersity to stream video to those devices.

Sure, you can copy your music and videos from iTunes to your iPhone or iPod Touch. But what if you want to listen to internet radio stations or just stream media (music, video, pictures) to your device? You could buy an internet radio application from the iTunes store, but that won't give you the ability to stream your own media to the device.

If you'd rather a free option, I suggest you try TVersity. Using this free software, you can stream to a number of devices including the iPhone, iPod Touch, PSP, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360.

As things stand right now, TVersity doesn't seem that great for streaming individual songs to the iPhone or iPod Touch. You have to tell it to play each song rather than playing an album or playlist at a time. Maybe this will be fixed in the next version. However, it's great for playing podcasts, audiobooks, videos (in the correct format) and streaming audio. It's wonderful on my Playstation 3 for streaming anything (other than what Sony screwed up with PS3 firmware 2.20 a while back).

Here's what you do:

Setting Up TVersity

• Read the Quick Start Guide
• Install TVersity
• Add your media to the library
• Go to http://localhost:41952/lib or http://localhost:41952/flashlib from the computer TVersity is installed on to make sure that everything is working
• From the iPhone or iPod touch, go to http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:41952/iphone, where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the computer you installed TVersity on

Easy. At this point, you should be able to stream media to your iPhone. But what about internet radio stations?

• Go to the SHOUTcast directory
• Find a stream you want to listen to, then click Tune In!
• In iTunes, right-click the stream, click Get Info, click Edit URL, then copy the URL
• Open TVersity and click the + button at the upper left
• Fill out the form as shown in the image below:

• Click Submit
• Rinse and repeat for any other stations you want.

Accessing TVersity on the Road

This is all great, but what if you want to access your media when you are away from home? Well, you can simply use the http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:41952/iphone URL as before. But if you are behind a router, you will need to substitute your external IP address instead. If you don't know what it is, just go to a site like WhatIsMyIP.com and get it from there. Very simple. Or is it?

What happens if your IP address changes on a regular basis? Your bookmark will stop working at the absolute worst time (like when you are trying to show off to one of your friends). This is where a dynamic hostname service like DynDNS or DtDNS comes in handy. Basically, they give you a hostname that points to whatever your IP address happens to be at the time. That way, you can bookmark something like http://yourniftyhostname.com:41952/iphone and not have to worry about the address changing. You should run client software in the background to ensure that your address is always updated when it changes.

DynDNS Update Clients - http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/
DtDNS Update Clients - http://www.dtdns.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=info.clients

Note: If you have a D-Link router, it's possible that you can enter your DynDNS account info in your router setup to update your DynDNS hostname with your IP address automatically. This eliminates the need for an update client. It's possible that other brands of routers can do this as well.

EDIT: Leave it to me to forget something very important! If you have a router and have more than one computer on your network, you will have to enable port forwarding for port 41952. To learn how to enable port forwarding, just do a Google search for something like port forwarding d-link or port forwarding linksys.