Mkv on ipad 2

kendo88

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Most of my video collection is HD. Most of it is in the mkv container. I want to be able to play these files on my iPad.

At the moment I use airvideo to play these files, but I'm looking to natively play these files on my iPad.

The best method I came across was remuxing the mkv files into m4v files. This removes the need for reencoding and should only ake a couple of minutes per file.

Now when I look this method up, people talk about MKVtools, iflicks and others.

Problem. These are all for OS X, I'm looking for a program for windows that does this whole process for me.

Anybody know of such programs?

Sent from my iPad using AVForums
 
Not a direct answer to your question but ahwt kind of MKV files? If 720p or lower, have you looked at AV Player HD? I just discovered it last week and have been using it on my iPad (mk1) since (as it actually plays files with AC3 audio) - it does play MKVs although my iPad struggles a little on 720p and above but as I'm shorty upping to an iPad 2, i'm looking forward to never having to convert anything again (I don't generally keep 1080p files).
 
I'm a bit reluctant to pay £2 for an app to just play videos. It's frustrating that there are apps to change mkv to m4v on mac, but not many for windows.

I don't wanna buy apps because I already have cineXplayer and VLC, I dont wanna keep getting different apps, and keep spending money, and I would assume decoding a 720p video using just the CPU would kill the battery

Sent from my iPad using AVForums
 
I'm a bit reluctant to pay £2 for an app to just play videos. It's frustrating that there are apps to change mkv to m4v on mac, but not many for windows.

I don't wanna buy apps because I already have cineXplayer and VLC, I dont wanna keep getting different apps, and keep spending money, and I would assume decoding a 720p video using just the CPU would kill the battery

Sent from my iPad using AVForums

Doesn't Handbrake have a window version. I use the Mac version.

HandBrake

Gazza
 
I'm a bit reluctant to pay £2 for an app to just play videos. It's frustrating that there are apps to change mkv to m4v on mac, but not many for windows.

I don't wanna buy apps because I already have cineXplayer and VLC, I dont wanna keep getting different apps, and keep spending money, and I would assume decoding a 720p video using just the CPU would kill the battery

Sent from my iPad using AVForums

Use handbrake, it has iPad specific settings and you can just drag and drop the resulting files into iTunes.
 
Yep I use handbrake for this too.

Scales down 1080p and 720p files to around 1gb each using the iPad defaults settings. It takes an hour or so to do each one but you can then store them for later. Just leave it running for a few days and do your whole video collection, then just drag the whole lot into iTunes and pick which ones you want on the iPad.

I do this for my kid's films when we fly. I can get 50 films easily on my 64gb iPad. They play really smoothly and look really good on the screen. A four hour flight with the movies on constantly uses about 50% of the battery.

HTH
M
 
I was under the impression that handbrake just did encoding. Therefore this results in very lengthy conversion times.

The thing is the mkv is x264 video, and the iPad can play this. Its just the container that apple doesn't support, so the video doesn't need to be converted, the container just needs to be changed, and with the right app, this take only take a matter of minutes

Sent from my iPad using AVForums
 
try using the plex media server? i stream all my media through that directly to the ipad. works a charm
 
I was under the impression that handbrake just did encoding. Therefore this results in very lengthy conversion times.

The thing is the mkv is x264 video, and the iPad can play this. Its just the container that apple doesn't support, so the video doesn't need to be converted, the container just needs to be changed, and with the right app, this take only take a matter of minutes

Sent from my iPad using AVForums

Absolutely agree, you should just be able to change the container. There are threads on here detailing how to do this.

The thing is all of my movies are 1080p or 720p video and are quite large in size. This quality is excellent on my big Plasma but not really necessary on my iPad (especially when only the kids are watching!). I would rather have more choice of movies with a lower quality.

So I run Handbrake to convert them. Yes it takes about an hour (sometimes as long as two) per movie, but the movie goes from about 8gb to about 1gb. So I can get more movies on the limited space of my iPad's internal memory.

I have a NAS and storage is cheap at home so I just convert all my movies and keep two copies, one big, one small.

Works for me! :thumbsup:

HTH
M
 
Sorfymark, thanks for your posts I will be doing exactly this from now on as I have just downloaded the software on your recommendation and am very pleased with the results so far!
 

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