vlc for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad back in iTunes App Store

[Eug]

If not now in your country, then later tonight or tomorrow - Friday, 2013-07-19.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13...paid-trainer-options-uber-adds-fare-splitting

iOS 5.1 required.

Hopefully it is decent, esp. for network streaming. One of the main reasons I went Android was for the better non-iTunes video streaming support.

 

[Rakehellion]

I still have the old one on my hard drive. I'm still pretty disappointed with the iOS video players out there, so we'll see how this one fares.

 

[bearxor]

Anyone try any high bitrate MKV's yet?

 

[el-Capitan]

I still have the old one on my hard drive. I'm still pretty disappointed with the iOS video players out there, so we'll see how this one fares.

Agreed. Absolutely terrible.

I have to stream all (using Plex now), but that is no good for airplanes.

 

[mmntech]

I have the old version from Cydia, but iFile never played nice with it. The new one looks just like it except for some bug fixes.

Agreed that the video apps on iOS are mostly rubbish. Streaming is fine but I only ever watch my own local media when I go places where there's no internet. Otherwise it's Netflix or YouTube. So having a good player is key.

 

[Eug]

I have the old version from Cydia, but iFile never played nice with it. The new one looks just like it except for some bug fixes.

Apparently it's been re-written, to comply with licencing issues. So, even though it may look similar in terms of the GUI it's probably quite different under the hood.

I just want something stable that will play all sorts of files without crashing. I haven't tried it yet though, since my personal devices are both Android. My wife has the iOS devices right now so I have to wrestle them away from her to give vlc a shot.

 

[Rakehellion]

Anyone try any high bitrate MKV's yet?

1080p works on my iPhone 5.

 

[Rakehellion]

Just tried to play a 4K video and it froze. Had to force quit. Not very promising for those iPad 4 users!

 

[Eug]

You don't need to be able to play a 4K video on an iPad 4. All you need to be able to do is upscale a 1080p video, and that's nowhere near as hard.

 

[Rakehellion]

You don't need to be able to play a 4K video on an iPad 4. All you need to be able to do is upscale a 1080p video, and that's nowhere near as hard.

But the iPad 4 is higher resolution than 1080p!

 

[Eug]

Can't download it to my iPad, since I'm in Canada.

 

[Rakehellion]

Can't download it to my iPad, since I'm in Canada.

There's always Cydia, which I guess is how people were getting the old one.

 

[Tegeril]

Still have the old one from the store... do we believe this is superior to that at present?

 

[Eug]

Got it loaded without Cydia. Had a different account on a different email that allowed me to re-login to the US store. They wanted a US address, but it just defaulted to the address of an Apple Store in New York, so I just went with that since I'm not putting in a credit card number anyway as it's a free app.

Unfortunately, I cannot figure how to stream over the network from my password-protected samba share with the new vlc. If I can't do this, then vlc becomes kinda useless for me at home. I'd just use my Android apps to stream over the network (eg. DicePlayer), or else my laptops.

 

[effowe]

I just tried it out on my iPad 3 w/ a 1080p MKV. It stated that my device might not be fast enough for playback, but I tried it anyways. It played but seemed to degrade the quality the few times I time shifted around.

XMBC for iPad, however, played the same MKV just fine. You need to be jailbroken for that, but it seems to work better for higher bitrate files in my short experience.

 

[Eug]

If vlc is struggling on an iPad 3, then obviously there needs to be much more optimization. Even the Apple TV 2 plays relatively high bitrate 1080p (as in MKV movies over 10 GB) just fine, and that thing uses the Apple A4, which is the chip in the original iPad. The original iPad is limited to 256 MB RAM though.

Any iPad from the A5 or later should be no problem at all, esp. since the A5-endowed iPad 2 includes 512 MB RAM.

Or does the upscaling slow vlc down on the iPad 3? I'll have to load a few higher bitrate files onto our iPad 2 to see how well it performs.

 

[TheStu]

If vlc is struggling on an iPad 3, then obviously there needs to be much more optimization. Even the Apple TV 2 plays relatively high bitrate 1080p (as in MKV movies over 10 GB) just fine, and that thing uses the Apple A4, which is the chip in the original iPad. The original iPad is limited to 256 MB RAM though.

Any iPad from the A5 or later should be no problem at all, esp. since the A5-endowed iPad 2 includes 512 MB RAM.

Or does the upscaling slow vlc down on the iPad 3? I'll have to load a few higher bitrate files onto our iPad 2 to see how well it performs.

It's probably an issue of VLC not getting access to the dedicated hardware for decoding.

What happens if you re-mux that MKV to MP4?

 

[Rakehellion]

If vlc is struggling on an iPad 3, then obviously there needs to be much more optimization. Even the Apple TV 2 plays relatively high bitrate 1080p (as in MKV movies over 10 GB) just fine, and that thing uses the Apple A4, which is the chip in the original iPad. The original iPad is limited to 256 MB RAM though.

Any iPad from the A5 or later should be no problem at all, esp. since the A5-endowed iPad 2 includes 512 MB RAM.

Or does the upscaling slow vlc down on the iPad 3? I'll have to load a few higher bitrate files onto our iPad 2 to see how well it performs.

1080p MKV runs on my iPhone 5. It might be a bitrate thing. There's also the option to disable deblocking to speed things up.

 

[Infohawk]

How does iOS VLC get access to local files on the iPhone?

 

[effowe]

How does iOS VLC get access to local files on the iPhone?

You can sync them through iTunes or it has a web server from which you can upload a file through a browser. It segments them into it's own Application folder like how some unsupported document viewers work.

 

[effowe]

It's probably an issue of VLC not getting access to the dedicated hardware for decoding.

What happens if you re-mux that MKV to MP4?

Same MKV converted to m4v and the file still had the same issues.

 

[bearxor]

How does iOS VLC get access to local files on the iPhone?

Every iOS Application sandboxes it's available files in its own folder. It's not that you can't copy files to an iDevice, it's that the file is only accessible to the application you specify. To open the document in more than one app, you'd need multiple copies of the file.

Edit: If you're REALLY interested:
http://developer.apple.com/library/...de/FileSystemOverview/FileSystemOverview.html