One of the weaknesses of iOS has been it's horrible video support. Having to pass through iTunes, or some 3rd party converter, it hasn't really been that great a video player. (Cough... cough... Quicktime... cough... cough... sucks... cough... cough...)
Then along comes VLC... yep... it's official. One of the great video players in the FREE market is now available on the iPad!
So far it can play almost anything it's desktop counterpart can... with one caveat, the iPad itself isn't fast enough to playback Bluray/HD files. So MKVs are out... (It will open it, but files are extremely choppy) but so far, most avis will play with no conversion needed.
This is great news since this has finally made iOS a viable and PRACTICAL portable video player. Now rivaling Archos.
Image quality is decent. Color banding is quite apparent specially in under and over exposed shots. I don't know if this is a player limitation, or the iPad's hardware limitation. But it's not a deal breaker for me since I'd rather have the convenience of easy video transfer.
Scrubbing and resume are supported. I don't know if the closed caption feature works though, I haven't played with it enough to figure that one out.
Will be running a battery of tests on it to see what it can or cannot play... if you have questions on video formats that you want me to test out as well, let me know!
**Long overdue update on this post... VLC is no longer available on iTunes, because of VLC's violation of their own licensing rights.**
**Long overdue update on this post... VLC is no longer available on iTunes, because of VLC's violation of their own licensing rights.**
How do you transfer videos onto the iPad. Do you have to go thru iTunes or is there a more direct approach?
ReplyDeleteHey Allan, thanks for reading. You still transfer through iTunes but no need for conversion. There's a VLC menu where you can just add the videos you want to transfer to your iPad.
ReplyDeleteGreat news! Thanks for the heads up!
ReplyDeleteUpdate! VLC now compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch.
ReplyDelete