VLC for Apple mobile platforms
- mark 10-25-2010 11:30 pm

From a review of VLC for iPad:

To use VLC to play your files, you need to go to iTunes, click the Apps tab, and then in the 'File sharing' section, select VLC and then 'Add'. You can then browse the files on your computer to choose which ones you want to stick on the iPad.


Jesus Fucking Christ on a Motherfucking Moped! What the fuck?! Just let me load my fucking files and play them. Why the fuck do I need to bring a motherfucking COMPUTER into the mix? If I've got a fucking computer, why the fuck do I need a fucking iPad?

Gosh!

Note: Relevant ... um ... actually, irrelevant.

- mark 10-29-2010 7:50 am


By the way, I had to tell the iTunes store my new credit card number and the county I live in (for sales tax purposes) before I could download a FREE app. So I was in a bad mood before discovering VLC is stupidly crippled in IOS.
- mark 10-29-2010 7:52 am


They're not asking you to pay for this in the App store, I hope.
- tom moody 10-29-2010 3:07 pm


No. It's free. But I downloaded through the App store, and they had to make sure they had the right county to charge the sales tax on "free". What they're really saying, with this gosh dang iTunes dependency, is that the iPad is not an independent device. I see a android pad in my future.
- mark 10-29-2010 10:29 pm


I just got a Toshiba netbook with W7. Price: cheap-ish! Haven't got videolan on it yet, but I'm anticipating it will be a snap to acquire from the "public internet." (In truth I will mainly be using the book to project animated GIFs, which won't require anything more elaborate than Firefox to play.)
- tom moody 10-30-2010 4:02 am


Still no luck with VLC on the iPad. I've got files loaded using iTunes. Looks like Apple is softening up the "thou shalt sync and overwrite anything that was previously synced from a different computer" stance. Movies can be added to the VLC application area without wiping out previously loaded movies.

VLC doesn't have access to the decoding HW through the IOS SDK API. Doing "HD-ish" decodes with third party SW isn't going to happen until Apple grants access to the decoder HW. ("HD-ish" refers to the 720p30 support in the HW. That format is sort of like HD, but ain't true HD. /video_snob)

I was able to get Apple's embedded player to work with some files I loaded through iTunes. (720p30, h.264, high profile level 3.1, in an MP4 wrapper, to be precise about the format.) Seems to keep up with the frame rate without obvious temporal artifacts. Weird thing is those exact same files loaded to the photo gallery via USB/dock gizmo don't play. They loaded onto the iPad just fine. The iPad won't even attempt to open them however. Why are files stored in two different parts of the file system treated differently?

(By the way, the SW that uploads media files via the USB/dock gizmo is hella fragile. The memory device must have a DCIM folder at the top level -- and NOTHING ELSE. Files to be uploaded to the iPad must be in that DCIM folder.)

With a SW upgrade to the Macbook Pro (2.6 GHz Core 2 Duo), it's able to decode the same files with Quicktime without problems seen earlier today. (Upgrade was to a whole bunch of stuff. I've been putting off an upgrade for months.)
- mark 10-30-2010 6:55 am





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