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VLC Video Player Coming to iPad

This is definitely a step in the right direction. Kudos to Apple if they let this through. I can see this being very useful if the Mk II of iPad will eventually allow USB devices.

Now cross our fingers and hope that the next iPad has USB support.
 
What about this article: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2911

" Tegra's 1080p decode can be done in the low 100s of mW. NVIDIA claims that the competition often requires well over 1W of total system power to do the same because they rely on the CPU to do some of the decoding."

To me that gives the impression that GPU decoding definitely uses less power than CPU decoding. Of course that's nVidia's claim and we have to choose to believe it but the way I see it using GPU to decode video is more (power) efficient than using CPU. GPU is designed to output graphics so it can do it with less effort than CPU which is used for general purpose computing. When you're running a 3D game your GPU is working a lot harder than when decoding video. One way to check this out is to run some videos with HW acceleration on and observe GPU temperature. Then run some 3D games. I bet there's a big difference between running games like Crysis and watching 1080p MKV in terms of GPU temperature. Of course you can't monitor temps on an iPad or iPhone but I assume that there's some relevance in my argument.
 
KnightWRX said:
You state this as fact. Do you have any backing for these assumptions ? Using a GPU is more efficient because the GPU doesn't need to be doing anything else and can provided optimized paths. But is it really less of a power draw ?

People, you need to start backing up your stuff. The GPU in Mac is a mofo on the battery. So is the GPU in my iPhone.
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Two points. One the CPU in all modern devices is ALWAYS the most power-hungry component. Why would you expect anything different? So much so that for the last 5 years, the main effort in mobile design is including low-power modes for when full CPU performance is not required. And video decoding is extremely processor intensive, so you're always going to running the processor in it's highest drain mode.

As far as facts, how about this. Which pretty assertively proves that with the right pairing of processor and GPU, you can realize very significant power savings.

Certainly if you go to super-duper highend graphics chips you could figure out a pairing where the GPU takes more power than the CPU, but that is extremely unlikely to be the case in a mobile device, where every component is carefully selected to be no more power hungry than necessary.
 
kiljoy616 said:
Oh I don't know, they want you to buy their video not pull it off the internet? :rolleyes:
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What a stupid argument is that? Apple has no history doing so. They want to sell you their devices. They don't make money on the content. This is how the iTunes-Store/ecosystem worked for years. Guess what. I can get all kinds of music and videos on my iOS device. 99% of this not bought on the iTunes-Store, but on actual CDs. Apple even forced the industry into DRM-free music. If they wanted to follow the path you're suggesting, abandoning DRM would have been stupid. And while we are at it. Video is a different discussion with the filmindustrie involved. And still. I can get any video on my iPad I want. Right now. Either by converting or ripping from DVDs.
 
I almost had an orgasm... this is fantastic news.

the approved Cinexplayer so why not VLC...?
 
@KnightWRX, relax man, and stop trying to win an argument just for the sake of it.

What other people are stating is true, and if you don't know this, you should educate yourself on basic facts before demanding people do that work for you. It should take you all of a minute or so to find tons references to the words dedicated h.264 hardware decoding and low power draw. In computer land there is only one kind of efficiency and that's power efficiency. There is no such thing as something that is more "efficient", but not more power efficient. If a chip or routine is more efficient, it's more efficient.

Of course a GPU uses up lots of power, but guess what? If the CPU was trying to do the same thing, it either couldn't do it at all, or would use up more power if it could. And yes, playing 3d games takes up more power than not playing 3d games, but you know what would take even more power? Running 2 non-specialized CPUs to do that task instead of a CPU and a GPU. Also, keep in mind that the iPad doesn't really have to do much multitasking like a normal OS, so when it's playing an h.264 video the CPU isn't burning through a lot of cycles doing other things. And to your comment that it can play games for 10 hours, guess why? It's because of the specialized graphics hardware that is more efficient than the main CPU.

Your other point that batteries are meant to be used so it shouldn't matter is pretty silly. One of the iPad's main selling points, and one that competitors have a hard time matching, is its 10 hour battery life. While you may not care if you have to recharge every 2 hours, the vast majority of typical users do. I definitely want this VLC app to be approved, but there's a pretty big caveat if using it means the iPad's battery will be drained 3 hours through my 10 hour flight. If that's going to be the case, then obviously this app would have limited appeal.
 
kiljoy616 said:
Oh I don't know, they want you to buy their video not pull it off the internet? :rolleyes:
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Can this argument please die? This is the same as the "Apple doesn't want to let people use Flash because there are free Flash games on the internet and they want everyone to buy apps instead" argument. But... Apple provides ways to get tons of free content, including game apps, educational content, videos, etc. right inside of iTunes. They just added a solid, built in version of Netflix to their AppleTV, and they've also approved Netflix apps for iOS devices. This despite the fact that Netflix streaming means a reduction in sales of any of those movies in iTunes. People need to remember that Apple is a hardware company first. iTunes is a money maker, but nowhere close to what they make from selling hardware.
 
KnightWRX said:
*sigh*. You do understand that negative/positive ratings can be on many facets of the story right ? As such, someone could rate this negative because he thinks Apple will reject the app. Or because he thinks the App won't be any good when it gets here or that it's vaporware and isn't really in the submission queue.

Heck, I just hit negative because of your post in this thread. I think it's negative that we have stories like these up where people feel the need to comment on others rating negative when they don't understand the system in the first place.
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:rolleyes: You state this as fact. Do you have any backing for these assumptions? :D

--

Back on point (please), getting VLC sounds delicious.

But has anyone tried ZumoCast yet? :confused:
Works for me, but i wonder why it's free.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

I use VLC on every computer that I own, so this is great! But PLEASE come to the iPod Touch and iPhone too!!!
 
KnightWRX said:
Thank you for not answering my question. Again, are you claiming that the "special circuitry" (otherwise known as the GPU to us in-the-know folks) is more power efficient than the CPU ? Or are you just trying to sound smart ? :rolleyes:

The advantages of hardware decoding are offloading the main processor from doing it so that it can continue to process other things, like your UI request, your input, sound decoding playback, etc.. It's essentially like having a second processor dedicated to video processing.

Now my question remains, you are now claiming that the GPU (or "special circuitry, or whatever you want to call it) is more power efficient than the CPU and that decoding the same video frame on it rather than the CPU takes less battery. Do you have proof of this ? Tests demonstrating in a reproducible way that this is so ? Power draw tests ?
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Care to post any reproducible tests demonstrating that an h.264 decoding GPU requires as much power as a CPU performing the same task? Because if you don't have hard proof of this, your claims are just as much a failed attempt at trying to sound "smart" as the OP's. Or are we just to assume that you really are "in-the-know"?
 
RobBookPro said:
My jaw dropped when I read that! This is great news and so much potential. I just hope my expectations are not too high.
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ImNoSuperMan said:
You have no idea how many times I've googled "Vlc for iPhone" & "Vlc for ipad" hoping to find some good news. I never thought I'd live to see this day *wipes tears*

Perfect timing too. My ipad should be here next week :D
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JS77 said:
+10000!
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baryon said:
VLC is awesome because it can play files that no other player can... Here's how it goes on your Mac:

You download a file
It doesn't play with any traditional player because it's corrupt or an unusual extension
You open it with VLC
It plays fine

On the iPad however, you cannot download files, you don't have a file system, and you don't even deal with corrupt files and every movie file you upload to the device is in Apple's special format, meaning that it's playable by the built-in video player. So where does VLC come in? Who will need it?
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irishgrizzly said:
How would you get video files on the iPad? In the same same way goodreader/iBooks works – through iTunes?
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This is what I am wondering! Does this mean you could watch Flash movies? Would it be like some of the content aware apps that ask if you want to open a file in a different app? Or would you click on an embedded Flash video on a webpage and it would pop up in the VLC player? Maybe you could use MobileMe or one of those 3rd party cloud file programs? Any ideas people?
 
AirVideo

fishmoose said:
Didn't they approve an app that played divx files for the iPad recently? I guess that mens this should be approved.
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I think they did yes. Plus I've been using AirVideo for over a month and it is terrific and performs on the fly format conversion and offline conversion and can add the results to itunes. I use it as the front-end to my 5Tb of movie files.

Having VLC as well will be great .. I'd love to see a FrontRow equivalent as well :cool:
 
Awesome! Now all we need is a proper version for the Mac (not this old outdated UI). http://wiki.videolan.org/Lunettes

KnightWRX said:
You state this as fact. Do you have any backing for these assumptions ? Using a GPU is more efficient because the GPU doesn't need to be doing anything else and can provided optimized paths. But is it really less of a power draw ?

People, you need to start backing up your stuff. The GPU in Mac is a mofo on the battery. So is the GPU in my iPhone.
Click to expand...

Yes it is a fact (which is common knowledge, or so I thought) that hardware-accelerated video uses less power.

Microsoft: "The reduction in CPU usage on machines with hardware video decoders greatly improves battery life" - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/09/benefits-of-gpu-powered-html5.aspx

Nvidia: "NVIDIA has worked side-by-side with Adobe to offload Flash content processing to graphics processors for smooth performance and extended battery life." - http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Flash-and-GPU-acceleration-NVIDIA-and-Adobe_5295.html

Adobe: "a GPU or media accelerator ... which greatly improves playback performance and battery life." - http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10.1_hardware_acceleration_print.html

Apple: "To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power." - http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Is that enough supporting evidence for you (since you obviously don't know how to Google this basic information for yourself)?
 
Who would vote this negative? My god!


What a stupid argument is that? Apple has no history doing so. They want to sell you their devices. They don't make money on the content. This is how the iTunes-Store/ecosystem worked for years.
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Apple makes a ton of money on hardware, yes. But Apple does indeed makes money off of the content ecosystem. They wouldn't be in the business if it didn't make them money.

As of 2007, billboard seems to think they were operating on a profit.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-9894585-27.html
 
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