My Wife Said No

One of the common complaints about the iPad (and any Apple product in their ecosystem) is the lack of video codec support. Apple restricts all their devices to various flavors of H.264 encoding and not much else. Numerous hacks are floating around the internets to allow devices like the Apple TV and iPhone to play other codecs. However, most of these get thwarted with Apple firmware updates or iTunes upgrades and have to be redone and reinstalled. The constant back and forth is not ideal and is frustrating at best. The iPad is the perfect “portable TV” device when it comes to size, comfort to hold, and battery life. But being restricted to just the iTunes store and H.264 encoding limits your viewing choices.

Thanks to the flexibility of the App Store this problem has been solved, sorta. The $3 Air Video app allows you to stream any video on your desktop straight to your iPad. You do have to install a small video server app to your desktop and have it on in order to stream your videos, but according to reviews, the quality over wi-fi is fantastic. Where the “sorta” comment comes in is that the app doesn’t actually stream ANY codec. Rather, it converts non-h.264 video on the fly using the ffmpeg library on your computer. This is a great workaround assuming your desktop can handle the conversion without choking which should be true for any 720p file but I wonder what a full 1080p Bluray rip would do.