Best movie player (AirPlay, stream, AC3)?

stenofsweden said:

Hello,

Which movie player works best under these conditions:

- Must have Air Play feature
- Must be able to receive stream over wifi from NAS (Synology)
- Should be able to handle as many formats as possible
- AC3 audio formats

Used Good Player before, but updated by mistake and it can no longer play AC3

Free or paid does not matter, the iPad is jailbroken if relevant

Thanks in advance!

Click to expand...

As I've explained at https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/16503806/ , third-party players with both UPnP and AirPlay support are, currently, as follows:

nPlayer, PowerPlayer, 8player, AcePlayer, BUZZ Player, GoodPlayer, CineXPlayer, GPlayer by Ginkgo Tech

Then, 1, connect to your ATV 2, just start playing back the video on your iDevice from your NAS. The video will be shown on the ATV - with full quality.

The above list only shows players that are able to make the ATV directly access iOS-native files off NAS sources. Of these players, only (the otherwise, not very good) CineXPlayer has AC3 support, should you also want to play back AC3 content locally, without AirPlay.

1. Did you drop GoodPlayer because it didn't support AC3 streaming over AirPlay? I, having no AC3 decoder hardware, can't test whether its output contains audio or not as the ATV (3, running the latest iOS version) doesn't downmix AC-3 -only audio tracks to stereo to be transmitted over HDMI, not even if you change the default “Auto” setting of Audio & Video > Dolby Digital to either Off or On. (Changing Audio & Video > Audio Output to 16 bits doesn't help either.)

I know it doesn't play back AC3 locally. I just want to know whether you can hear the AC3-only audio on the ATV if you do have an external AC3 decoder.

2. I, however, very thoroughly tested CineXPlayer in the UPnP-to-AirPlay setup for you. Unfortunately, it leaves a LOT to be desired and is pretty much useless:

- when operating directly from a UPnP source: the player crashes upon trying to stream all(!) my hi-res (1080p) test files, including my standard AC3(-only) tester at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/81986513/1...testfiles/m4v-with-ac3-startsWithKeyframe.m4v (DropBox link). Lower-res AC3 ones like the one at https://dl.dropbox.com/u/81986513/022013/m4v-with-ac3-startsWithKeyframe-iPhone4Res.mp4 (this is a downsized version of the previous video with one AC3 audio track only; DropBox link) are streamed – but without sound.

- The same files when playing from the local (iPad) storage are played back via AirPlay with audio, unlike when streaming from UPnP servers.

Important: Note that playing back anything over AirPlay requires Mirroring to be enabled. Then, the picture, albeit it makes use of the entire horizontal screen estate, will be hopelessly stuttering with high-res material. Lower-res one will be better but in no way as good as with native playback – which, with native iOS source file formats (mov / mp4 / m4v), would be preferable (and is done by the players I've listed in my first post).

nicoolcon001 said:

i think you should try this app http://buyipad2reviews.com/ipad-2-imovies

Click to expand...

He shouldn't as iMovie has nothing to do with streaming / AC3.