iPad2 Video Playback

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Superjoe

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 20, 2008
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Don't have an iPad but frankly getting more and more inclined to switch to it. I think the only thing that I'm really unsure about is how capable it is for playing back HD video. Everything that I have is 720-1080p .mkv's. Is there a player capable of knocking that stuff out without any drama?

Conversion is really a last resort unless there is an app that does it on the fly as I add them to the iPad. I'm used to the convenience of drag and drop with my android tablet. It unfortunately can't quite playback even most 720p move. (ASUS Transformer)

Thanks for the input!
 
I've never even tried to play back an mkv on my ipad 2 as all of mine are huge....however, it has played every 1080p m4v that I have sent over to it...I have an android tablet (Acer Iconia) and it is a lot more picky....so I make my encodes so they play on that (1080p m4v) and those play fine on the iPad 2.

I use AVPlayerHD to transfer my movies over wifi...it just steps up an ftp or http server and you login with your browser on your PC...then copy copy over...

Just looking in the help...it does handle mkv's....but I don't have any small ones to test with. Sorry.
 
oh...the faq for AVPlayerHD says this:

Q: Audio Sync is not coordinated.
A: When decoding high quality videos using S/W, the capacity may be lacking...
Especially in case of h265 included in MKV container, it requires a very large capacity.

Note that iPad 2 only has 512 memory, too, so playing big files make force you to close stuff down. Now, I regularly transfer files up to 2GB and then play fine, but those are 1080p m4vs/mp4.
 
You'll get the greatest quality and most flexibility pre-converting your files and streaming (or loading) directly to the iPad. That said, assuming you have a decently-fast machine to do on-the-fly conversion, AirVideo works well. I've had little trouble with on-the-fly conversion from 1080p H.264 to the iPad, even with the fairly anemic Core 2 in my iMac, but it's just not the best way to go from a quality and flexibility standpoint.
 
Thanks! My main intention is to pre-load the ipad so that I can take it to work and watch something on my lunch break. The streaming stuff won't really work for me. At this point I'll probably wait to see if the iPad3 gets a processor bump. If it does get the rumored quad-core it hopefully won't even matter what format it's in.

Thanks!
 
i ripped a dvd for ipad format and it played back just fine, all in high quality. i've watched hd videos on it without a single hiccup. no worries, but m4v will be the way to go, mkv isn't fully streamlined for playback on it.
 
I got that air video app mentioned up thread...one really cool app. I have several bit-perfect blu-ray rips to mkv....after installing the server part on my movie server PC, I was able to do live conversion and stream that to my iPad.....works well, most. The high bit-rate parts do suffer quite a bit.....

I also used it to stream several of the m4vs I have...that works great.....I could also play them back from the iPad to the apple tv device to view on my big screen tv. That worked to.

What I like about this app is that I don't need to open iTunes on that pc to stream to my iPad. I am not a fan of iTunes on windows....a pig of a program....

I'm also curious about using this app to stream to my iPad from the Internet.
 
I simply use Plex on the iPad. It allows me to select and change the streaming options on the go, including seperate settings for local and remote networks and has a beautiful interface for Plex Media Server.
 
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