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Best app to play MKV

I

iohass

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 11, 2012
164
0
Canada
I'm loving the new iPad screen but am having trouble playing any kind of video on it. I tried VLC player and Playable and struggled with both. As playable just sucked, while VLC told me that my device may be too slow.

Is there an app that I can watch 720/1080p MKV without having to use handbrake or something else to convert?
 
I loaded up the old vlc app, but that was pulled ages ago. Good player is highly recommended by most folks.
 
That old VLC app was awesome. I'm glad I still have it.

Goodplayer works with the new iPad, but it crashes when I try to play an AVI file with multi core decoding turned on. Luckily the file plays fine with multi core turned off.
 
iohass said:
have you guys tried it on the new ipad?
Click to expand...

Yes, still doesn't work very well (tried lots of apps). But you can use SmartConverter Pro to convert the mkv file to a mp4 file, it takes about 40 seconds for me and the quality is pretty good while the audio remains in sync.
 
gorskiegangsta said:
GoodPlayer, no question about it. You can even stream HD movies to it from any Mac with an app. called MediaShare (on the Mac App Store).
Click to expand...


But GoodPlayer doesn't play 1080p MKVs does it? Does any player do this yet? I'm either gonna go with that or AVPlayerHD, hopefully at least one of them will update soon to support 1080p MKVs.
 
I actually tried playing mkv files again in GoodPlayer and it works pretty well, a bit better than AVPlayer HD. You notice a tiny bit of lag but it's perfectly viewable. The file I tried earlier must have been damaged.
 
mrt209 said:
I actually tried playing mkv files again in GoodPlayer and it works pretty well, a bit better than AVPlayer HD. You notice a tiny bit of lag but it's perfectly viewable. The file I tried earlier must have been damaged.
Click to expand...

Was this a 720p or a 1080p video?
 
I was thinking the exact same yesterday when I got my new iPad. Luckily I had someones iPad 2 at hand. Jailbroke it and installed a bunch of cr***ed ones (i know, I know but was only using to test)

AvPlayerHD was the best I found so went ahead and purchased on my new iPad

Hope this helps :)

Moral of the story; Apple should allow the trialing of apps, or refunds within a short period of time.
 
Yeah even a 1 day trial would be nice for this kind of stuff and games.

It's disappointing that even 720p is lagging on this, though. I was sure it would play fine. Otherwise what's the point of the retina
 
There is also BuzzPlayer HD, streams any video format from a NAS or computer, no remote server application needed. Also plays movies transferred locally.
 
iohass said:
Yeah even a 1 day trial would be nice for this kind of stuff and games.

It's disappointing that even 720p is lagging on this, though. I was sure it would play fine. Otherwise what's the point of the retina
Click to expand...


You tried AVPlayerHD, doesn't lag for me. Perfect.

Also, it's because of what apple allows. The iPad is powerful enough to play 1080p, easily. But it's the fact that it's in an MKV container that causes access to the GPU to be cut off. So all work has to be done via the CPU. Mp4 etc has access to GPU. The first iPad was able to play 720p mkv through XBMC (Jailbrake app - able to use GPU)
 
You can remux MKV to MP4/M4V without re-encoding the video, using Subler, MP4Tools, iFlicks or iVI -- and at the same time embed poster artwork and metadata to make everything look nice. Unless you have devices that can't play MP4s well, it may be worth doing. Some of the tools have batch modes so you can just queue them up and have them all done in no time.
 
peterjcat said:
You can remux MKV to MP4/M4V without re-encoding the video, using Subler, MP4Tools, iFlicks or iVI -- and at the same time embed poster artwork and metadata to make everything look nice. Unless you have devices that can't play MP4s well, it may be worth doing. Some of the tools have batch modes so you can just queue them up and have them all done in no time.
Click to expand...

This. Can't be waiting around for Apple to allow 3rd parties access to hardware assisted playback, just went ahead and used Subler to repackage and add metadata for some 1080p MKVs and they now play flawlessly through the basic IPad Videos app.
 
Goodplayer and AVplayerHD both work well. Most of you that are having problems with choppy video need to remux your mkvs. Some MKVs will be muxed correctly but if you have stuttering video, it means that your MKVs aren't formatted correctly. If you want to keep it simple, I normally use Handbrake or Videomonkey to get 720p video into iTunes so it plays natively on iPads, iPhones, and ATVs.

1080p videos in MKV will stutter since it can't use hardware decoding properly. If you want smooth 1080p videos, you should convert into mp4 h264 with aac audio. You can also include subtitles and audio tracks with the format and it just tends to be cleaner.
 
eurobum said:
But GoodPlayer doesn't play 1080p MKVs does it? Does any player do this yet? I'm either gonna go with that or AVPlayerHD, hopefully at least one of them will update soon to support 1080p MKVs.
Click to expand...

Just tried playing a 1080p .MKV clip in Goodplayer on the new iPad. Super choppy, probably be worse on older devices. Not super disappointed, personally, as I have 720p versions for almost every video I have but I can definitely see the downside.
 
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