Well, the answer is, go to the App Store. There are quite a few apps which let you do exactly this, i.e. stream video to your iPhone. While there are many, the best of the lot, is the Air Video. In this post we will show you how you can stream a video on the iPhone/iPod touch through the Air Video.

One of the big problems of watching a video on the iPhone is the file format issue. The problem is that most of the common video formats – AVI, Divx, MKV etc, are not supported by the iPhone. Now, Air Video’s extremely cool “Live Conversion” feature solves that problem in a jiffy. It does so by converting the files to iPhone/iPod touch compatible format (h.264), on the fly. That means, the days of waiting endlessly for the file to be converted are over.

Using Air Video is easy. Install the app, get into a Wi-Fi zone and add a server (or multiple servers). Servers can be added manually (unless you are using the smart Mac, which more or less intuitively, ahem, automatically detects) Well, after that, it’s all about tap and play. It can play from your shared folders, or from the internet. For streaming from the Internet, use the app’s “Remote” tab, tapping which will ask for a specific PIN form you. That’s it. The app is ready to stream in the videos over the Internet for you.

Whichever one you choose, make sure of one thing, if you are planning to stream DRM protected videos to your iPhone/iPod touch, the no donuts for you. Air Video will not support that. The other problem is that  conversion burns a lot of CPU power as Air Video is a server side application. Air Video has both a free (with limited streaming options) and a paid ($2.99) version.

Other video streaming apps: The cult of dreamy downloads means that the App Store does provide other options. There is quite a handful of options for you. And as usual, quite few of them are, well, not that good. However, you can probably try out Orb (which gives a nifty Webcam support option). Besides, Roxio Streamer, Streamer and Stream to me are also worth trying out.