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VLC vs. Movies app

nostaws

nostaws

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 14, 2006
554
521
I bought an iPad 2 yesterday. Never bought gen. 1. I have VLC, and the Movies app.

Does anyone have experience with one being easier on the battery than the other with the first gen iPad?

I am going on a decently long trip and want to maximize my battery life.
 
I don't habe an answer to the question but I have a threory.

I tried to play a 720p file on the ipad 2 in both VLC and the Video player. In VLC is stuttered and didn't run properly, in Videos it ran perfectly. Tried the same thing on the Iphone 4, same reults.

This leads me to belive VLC is using the processor exclusively and is pushing it quite hard but the Videos app can offload some of the work to the GPU.

I would guess that videos would use less battey working because it works more efficiently but it;s just a guess
 
oh with 'Movies' app you meant the native 'Videos' one.

well then, it's quite obvious.
As thedon has pointed out, VLC does only software decoding, while the Videos app does get hardware decoding.
Therefore better performance + less battery drain.

So now you'll have to figure out whether you wanna re-encode all those AVIs you have so you can play them with the native app or you wanna live with the slightly worse battery life (which is still awesome, though) due to using VLC.

also, if you have 720p and beyond movies, VLC won't (properly) play those anyways, so you'd have to re-encode them anyways
 
When i first realised I would need to convert my files I thought man, what a waste of time.

I found out about handbrake, put all my files in a queue and just left them overnight, it's really easy doing it with that prgram.
 
Just to be clear we are talking about apple's movie app right. Also anyone try with cinexplayer?
 
Yes we're talking about the Movie player app included by Apple.

With regards to cinexplayer, it's probably going to have the same issue as VLC where all decoding is done via software.

I assume the hardware decoding functionality is not availible to developers?
 
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