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Menneisyys2

macrumors 603
Original poster
Jun 7, 2011
5,997
1,101
A fairly new entry to the iOS media player scene is iMPlayer (AppStore links: small-screen version; iPad version. Both cost $2.99). I've reviewed the current (1.3.0) version.


(AppStore page; also showing it being installed on my iPhone 5 after my purchase. As usual, click the image for an enlargened version.)

In the pros / cons section below, I've elaborated on the player very thoroughly. To recap all those: in a word: I do NOT recommend this player, unless you really need adding / managing bookmarks in videos. It's just too weak (while, taking its pretty bad performance into account, heavily overpriced).

The only advantage of the player is the ability to add bookmarks anywhere, in any kind of a video, along with a small framegrab of the video. Unfortunately, very few other players are capable of this. An example using the standard Monsters MKV test video (link):



Incidentally,

1, the screenshot above also shows there's no Retina support when software decoding is used; hence the low resolution

2, also, pay special attention to the errors the (very weak) H.264 decoder of the app is introducing to the decoded frame. For example, to the left of the green animal (or whatever) on the left, you can see rectangle-shaped green blotches – those have been introduced by the decoder. (The second thumbnail at the bottom also shows such problems.)

3, should you want to manually back up (or migrate to another iDevice) your bookmarks, they're under Library/BookmarkDir, directly accessible via, say, iExplorer. A screenshot of the above-listed Monsters thumbnails (along with some other ones):

iMPlayer-bookmarksinfs.png


The detailed pros / cons lists:

Cons

Software-decoded videos are played back in low-res on Retina screens
Non-Universal, which is further made worse by the high price
No AC3
No DTS
Absolutely no streaming support
Absolutely no support for audio-only files (WMA, FLAC, APE, WAV, WV, OGA stb.)
Absolutely useless (very slow) H.264 decoder
No MKV hardware playback
Absolutely no SSA subtitle support
Absolutely no textual subtitle support in MKV files (see Monsters)
No gesture-based ffwd / rewinding
No playlists (however, you can still create folders in the app)

Pros

Excellent, unique bookmark support
iOS-native files are played back in hardware (and with Retina-friendly resolution)
Apple CC tracks displayed in iOS-native files
Good WMV support (also WMA Pro) – albeit not as fast as that of, say, AVPlayer.
Tolerable DVB TS support if you don't need subs / multiple audio tracks (scrubbing and aspect ratio changes supported; however, merging the interlaced frames is very ugly when there's plenty of movement on screen. There's no subtitle rendering or audio track changing.)
 
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