Newby Movies Question!

jason44mag

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Okay, I apologise whole heartedly for this question but I am playing catchup with a lot of stuff now that I have added Ipad & Iphone to our family!
My question is what is the best/easiest/quickest way to deal with movies and itunes?

I already have XBMC installed on apple tv for home use but what is the best way to deal with movies/tv shows when wanting to watch them on ipad/iphone?

To clarify further, a lot of my content is .avi or .mkv so I know I can’t just import them into itunes and sync with my devices and I really don’t want to spend hours & hours converting things that I would likely only watch once then delete.

Can you guys shed some light on this & let me know how you go about it? This must be a common problem and I am assuming there are several options available?

Thanks in advance!
 
Don't buy them in a mkv or avi container :)


Or search on the App Store for as player that can play those formats natively.

But to be honest as you have a Apple TV as well you are much better of ripping your DVDs and blurays in the correct container in the first place.
 
Thanks, just to clarify when you say better off ripping my dvds/blurays, what is the best thing to use?
 
jason44mag said:
Thanks, just to clarify when you say better off ripping my dvds/blurays, what is the best thing to use?

With dvdfab you can pass it straight through. A bluray takes me about 15 minutes. Then run it ivi to get the metadata embedded which is instant. Hope that helps.
 
MKV2MP4 will allow you to sync them to iOS devices, saves re-encoding the media.

AVI2MP4 does the same thing, Apple support MPEG-4 video as long as it's in m4v containers, although not all XviD/DivX AVI files may work with this.

When encoding for iOS devices use mp4/m4v container, the best you can get audio wise is AC3 5.1 audio (some encoders allow copying original track) it is also possible to use Apple lossless audio too but very few encoders support that (XiD4PSP an x264 encoder is one of the few that does).
 
Why not just run XBMC on your iPad too?

You'l have to jailbreak though. ***easy***
 
Not sure about iPhone but on my iPad i use AVPlayer. It supports a lot of file formats and has recently been upgraded to use HW decoding for .MKV's.
No converting is needed, you can just drag and drop via iTunes or transfer over WiFi without needing iTunes.
The only downside is that as we know, MKVs are pretty large so you do need a lot of space for this sort of thing.

Well worth the cost IMO.
 

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