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Flawless HD video playback on your iPad

lavrishevo

lavrishevo

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jan 9, 2007
1,864
204
NJ
After a bit of research and messing around I have found a great player that can play .mkv 720 and 1080 flawlessly on the iPad 2. I have not tried the iPad 1 but it looks really good nonetheless.

May I suggest using iPhone explorer for Mac & PC to easily drag and drop your video files to your iPad.

http://www.macroplant.com/iphoneexplorer/

So the player is XBMC player.

Go to Cydia and add: http://mirrors.xbmc.org/apt/ios/

Download XBMC player

Use iPhone Explorer to create a folder in var/mobile. I created one called Video.

Once you copy the video files into the folder you created select the video tab in XBMC, then select add video, select Home Folder, select the video folder you created.

XMBC is a very powerful media player / streamer and I don't know all the options but the HD playback, even at 1080 encoded movie is fantastic. Tons of options as well.

You will notice that the application has been ported to work with iOS but there is no swiping and such. It uses the touchscreen to select the mouse click. This is not ideal by far but the benefits of HD playback far outweigh these pitfalls.
 
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VLC can't playback HD video locally stored. Or at least (old VLC player) does a terrible job at it, choppy any all messed up. Also, XBMC player is the only player I know of that can play .mkv files on the iPad. I'm
Not talking about streaming, I'm talking about HD playback locally stored!
 
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AVPlayerHD works great on my iPad2 as well. Plays .mkv in bot 720p/1080p transferred via iTunes no prob. Just another option.
 
mikephotos said:
AVPlayerHD works great on my iPad2 as well. Plays .mkv in bot 720p/1080p transferred via iTunes no prob. Just another option.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I will check that one out. Was not aware there was another player that will do .mkv
 
Hey OP another great thing about using XBMC on a jailbroken Ipad2. As you pointed out the touch navigation is less than ideal.

Download the app on your iphone called xbmc commander. And you can set this app (using your iphone) to control the xbmc interface on the ipad2.

Pretty nice!
 
You should correct the word that you type in the description

it should be 'XBMC' not 'XMBC' :apple:
 
plex is better and easy both mac and pc server and clients. for all IOS devices
 
I think XBMC is the best mediaplayer for ios devices out there, by far. I can stream a lot of my 1080p movies from my wireless G (not even N) to my iPad 2 without a hitch, once a touchscreen designed skin is out, it will be the definitive mediaplayer for iPad :)
 
I use XBMC and i use iTunes to transferre the files..

How? Easy...


I allready had Movie Player installed, so I made a symlink to its documents folder inside /var/mobile/Media and added the folder to XBMC.

Works great, i just add movies to Movie Player in ituens and they show up in XBMC.
 
There is a touch skin being made at the moment here. Also, there is a skin called PM3.HD that works quite well for the moment. But xbmc doesnt work with the hdmi adapter and DisplayOut in cydia doesnt work either.
 
Buzz Player

I stopped looking after I found the Buzz Player Application. I have played 1080i mkv Bluray rips and they look amazing.

I have read some odd reviews stating that the player skips on higher resolution files but that is not my experience with this application.

I will still give XBMC a try. Thanks for the information.
 
I generally just use splashtop if I want to do anything from my pc because I don't like buying/having five different streaming apps on my iPad and pc for different things, though maybe im being silly and it's worth it. Maybe it hasn't bothered me because I have never tried to stream HD.

For sharing movies to the iPad local storage and playing them I have Azul media player and it seems to work fine, has anybody used it and the others being mentioned here? Any specific advantage to the others?

Once the camera connection fix is up I'll probably care a lot more, with my puny 16 gb storage I've 99% streamed Netflix or HBO for movies.
 
I use HTPC running MCE 7 and I use air video to stream my HD recordings to my Ipad. Works great, doesn't require transfers via itunes or any other app and saves space on ipad. I do use XBMC on my HTPC and it is by far the best most versatile player made. It works perfectly on my HTPC and I have yet to have any file not being playable by XBMC.
 
Dorfdad said:
plex is better and easy both mac and pc server and clients. for all IOS devices
Click to expand...

I use plex to, works great. I like the addition of the movie art and information etc plus its a nice remote control for the mac plex media player. I've gone from airvideo then streamtome and I think finally I can safely stick with plex instead.

As for keeping 720p mkv files locally on the iphone 4 and ipad 1, I've yet to come across an app that can play with without the movie stuttering so I'll give some of the apps mentioned above a try.
 
I'll add my vote for AVPlayerHD. I've used many out there including VLC, yxplayer, Azul and others. I like AVPlayerHD the best, it supports multiple formats and has excellent file management support.
 
 
 
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