Most of you know the VLC desktop application. If you don’t, it’s a movie and video player that pretty much supports every filetype under the sun. If QuickTime and Perian can’t get your videos playing, there’s a good chance that VLC can. Between these two applications, and the Perian plugin, you rarely have to go looking for codecs so that your movies will play, which is great if you’re on a laptop, but what about the iPad?
Up until recently, you’ve been forced to use Apple’s favourite filetypes. If they weren’t supported by Apple, you weren’t going to be able to play them, which was a shame, but now the fine folks at Applidium have put together a VLC Player (free) for the iPad and iPhone. Early reports and reviews indicate that the application is a little jittery and has some bugs. Our first run through with the app definitely picked up some bugs—the application says that there’s no audio available for every movie that we’ve tried to add.
Now, before you get all excited and try to play a flash video (.flv) on the iPad, you should also know that it’s being reported that the videos with that filetype aren’t showing up in the application. You’re still out of luck, and Apple still hates Flash.
Other applications have also popped up over the last couple weeks that let you play other filetypes, outside of the traditional iTunes formats. Both OPlayer ($4.99) and CineXPlayer ($3.99) are available on the App Store already, and the Plex application lets you stream various filetypes from your desktop or laptop directly to your iPad. So, there you have it, some extra choices for your video watching needs.
