iPad Has anyone gotten video to work?

[Kolenka]

Originally Posted by Crowl

Ah, its the container rather than a filetype thing like with avi.

Pretty much.

MPEG-4's file container is the same as Quicktime 4's MOV container I believe. Apple submitted the format to the MPEG board and it got included in the spec, so supporting both MP4 and MOV is a no-brainer in Apple's mind.

MPEG-4's main codecs are H.263 (the spec XviD uses) and H.264 (AVC), and AAC for audio. The iPod/iPhone/iPad have hardware decoders for MPEG-4 video, and MP3 is also supported because it really is a no-brainer.

AVI is common, but it has some problems. The ability to hold H.263/H.264 and MP3 aren't really part of the original spec, so you need to implement a modified reader. This was done by people building OSS or codec packs for Windows, but that's really it. So you have free software to play and create it, but it never really had industry support on a large scale. MKV is much better, but falls even more into the hobbyist niche because it is competing with the old stand-by of AVI, even though it is clearly a superior container to AVI, and free to license unlike the MPEG-4 container.

The difference these days is that the hobbyist niche spews ungodly amounts of video out onto the internet, and you have the darknet/torrent encodes that are almost always something shoved into AVI or MKV. YouTube has it in their own interests to at least import this stuff, even if it then stores it in MPEG-4 on the server anyways because Flash understands that natively these days.

But keep in mind that the industry has no reason to go out of their way to encourage sharing of video files of dubious legal standing. Especially when a company like Apple sells enough Macs, iPods, iPhones, etc combined that they just pay the MPEG board a flat yearly fee and use MPEG-4 for everything they do with multimedia. And there are plenty of tools to convert to MPEG-4, many of the best ones for the hobbyist crowd are the same ones that spit out the AVI/MKV files as well. A company like Apple doesn't see the point in complicating the experience handling extra formats when in their mind, it should simply be MPEG-4.

That isn't to say they are right about it... but MPEG-4 is the closest format you will find to 'it just works' because MPEG-4 specifies what is MPEG-4 from the formats allowed in the container to the container itself. Even MKV is just a container and needs to be paired with video/audio formats, and there is no real standard there, just that everyone seems to like using H.264 (via x264) and MP3 (or sometimes AAC and/or AC3) for everything, so it may feel like a standard.

[Mirrorlike]

Bit of a niche question, but anyone had any luck with subtitles (srt files)?

[Kolenka]

You'd need a way to either burn the image in, or convert them and merge them into the MP4 file. SRT files by themselves are not supported.

I do believe handbrake will convert and merge SRTs into the MP4 file in a way that the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad will support.

[Mirrorlike]

confirming that yes, handbrake does work, & yes the iPad plays them.

the setup on handbrake is a bit tricky, but logical