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Streaming from iCloud Drive?

pdaholic

pdaholic

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jun 22, 2011
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I haven't came across an app that allows for streaming files from iCloud. For instance, if you have a music file in iCloud on Goodreader, you have to download the file to the device before it plays in the app. I know iCloud Drive is still in Beta, but i'm wondering if it's possible to stream anything from it? The ability to stream music and video from Dropbox has been really nice. I would love to switch over to iCloud drive given the pricing scheme!
 
I just got iOS 8 and iCloud Drive today. I would also like to know if we are able to stream movies or music directly from iCloud Drive. I loaded a home movie I created that is about 2 hours long directly into icloud.com in the iCloud Drive section. I was able to stream it directly from the browser. I looked everywhere on my iPhone and iPad but couldn't find it. Has anyone been successful doing this?
 
You would need a video app that has implemented the iOS 8 document picker. Then you would be able to select the video file from iCloud Drive and play it in that video app.

This will be more and more common as more apps get updated for iOS 8. The Document Picker is a very easy API to add to most apps.
 
Makes sense. I see that apple has three native document pickers (keynote, numbers, and pages). It would have been to have apple include one for photos and one for videos as well. I want to store all my home photos and home videos in iCloud Drive. Then just go to videos on Apple TV and play them. I guess when an app comes out with a video or photo document picker I'll be able to Airplay it. I do that now with dropbox though so it wouldn't be much different.
 
Any apps out there that have already implemented this? Is it indeed possible to stream video from the iCloud Drive?
 
I'm also interested, I tried the App "Documents" but it's not working properly. VLC should add this as soon as they hopefully come back to the iTunes Store, don't you think?
 
Is there really still no option to stream files from iCloud, not even on Mac? It's pretty annoying now that Mac OS will automatically offload files it doesn't think you'll use to the cloud. I often find myself wanting to watch a movie I have in my documents folder and it will be on iCloud and not my hard disk and it seems the only way to view it is to wait for the whole thing to download instead of just streaming it from quicklook/quicktime/vlc? Am I missing an obvious setting somewhere to fix this? Seems like a weird omission.
 
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This is quite an old thread that was brought back, but the problem still remains. I gave up on iCloud being my primary storage, and stuck with Dropbox iCloud is great for uploading—stick a file in an iCloud folder and it will upload without timing out, but not great for streaming, as you have to wait for the entire file to download before it can be played. oh well.
 
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