how does mkv 720p etc. work? i.e. not apple supported formats.. on 3rd party media players on the iPad? I have a bunch of stuff i wanna play if i get one BUT i cannot be arsed converting EVERY file i have when i want to play it. thanks!!
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new iPad / iPad 2 video playback
- Thread starter aoaaron
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The App you're looking for is AVPlayer HD. That's the one I used for my iPad 2 and it plays anything I've thrown at it from the web. I once put a 720p mkv episode of Entourage and it played but there was a a bit off stutter so it wasn't 100% watchable mostly due to the iPad 2 being a bit weak.
However the iPad 3 is graphically much more capable and should be able to playback 720p and even 1080p Mmkv files without a problem. And what's also nice about AVPlayer HD is that you can delete files on the go, which I tend to do on holiday after having watch films that eat up space.
Its an absolute must have app for anyone who want to be able to play any video downloaded off the net without converting.
That might not actually be true. The new iPad is four times faster with the graphics but the actual processor may be the same speed as the iPad 2. If that is the case then I don't think these programs will run any faster because I don't think they use the graphics core but actually the processor core instead. As far as I know only Apple supported profiles are actually accelerated from the graphics core which is why battery life and processing power is better. I think the MKV files and everything else is just the CPU core doing the work.
Good player works quite well on the iPad and iPhone. It's just a single application that will work for both. MKVs play well on it but it also depends on what the base codecs are however. MKV is a container so just because you have a player that supports MKV doesn't mean that it plays all MKVs. As said before, most players that support MKV won't have hardware decoding unless the app specifically supports hardware decoding. If you're using soft decodes, you'll get a battery life drop of about 150-200%. Best is if you use h.264 mp4s which will natively play on the iPad which will also save you battery life.
Yeah those a good points and playback will certainly be dependent on the architecture of the GPU, whether it includes a video decoder core and whether developers can write apps that effectively decode videos by utilizing the most capable resource of the A5X.
But I'm rather hopefully that most MKV files will be able to play well, hopefully with hardware acceleration which is where the muscle power is. 🙂
I've had amazing luck with GoodPlayer with most 720p h264 (hardware accelerated), x264, and xvid in either .mp4 or .mkv. You can even map a Samba or networked share to it & download or stream them without connecting to the computer. The only problem was with a high bit rate 720p at 60fps. (racing video)