Air video streaming and data use question

[3GEE]

Sorry for the very basic question, I'm new to the air video app and streaming in general.

I have some movies loaded on my iMac, most are well above 1 G in size. I have a very draconian daily limit of 200 M on my wifi. I got the air video app and it looks like it's going to work fine for streaming the movie to my iPad.

When I started the air video app it said "loading movie". I immediately shut it off because I wasn't sure if this "loading" was using data while streaming. My question is this: when this movie is loading or streaming, is it going to use in excess of 1 G of data?

Sorry for the simplistic question but if I exceed my daily 200 M it will shut down my wifi for a full 24 hours (how lame is that). Cheers.

 

[kevhui]

No. It won't. Loading might stream some data as buffer but it won't be huge.

 

[Scuby]

Do you really mean you have a 200MB limit on your wifi (ie between your iMac and your iPad), or are you referring to your 3G limit?

It will almost certainly use over 200MB on your wifi, though exactly how much depends on the streaming quality you set. Shouldn't use any data on your 3G though.

 

[sammich]

You'll be watching the transcoded version of that video in Air Video. It's usually a smaller version so that it fits over the network. It depends on the upload speed of your internet from your iMac. You can set the speed from within the app, but typically, it will use up to about 300KB/s at the max.

It also adapts to the speed of the net. If your 3G is the area is only 100KB/s down, then the video will obviously only stream at 100KB/s from your iMac.