A month ago I wrote about the possibility to quickly transcode existing H.264 video files fin MKV containers for playback on the iPad (Link). It saves a lot of time to just recode the audio track and copy over the video track.
Over the time I did some more experiments and I’m always astonished how many video files the iPad (non jailbreak) will play back with GoodReader. Other apps might provide you with the same result, as I assume that most app developers rely on Apple’s SDK provided video playback routines, but I haven’t tested other apps.
Commonly used codecs xVid and DivX just work fine and playback nicely on the iPad after converting the audio track to the AAC codec.
In general the prep of the video is the same: Within avidemux copy the video stream unchanged and set the audio stream to a conversion to AAC and save the result to a MP4 container.
Following a list of codecs that work with the described method:
Codec, Codec Profile
DivX5, Simple@L1
DivX5, Advanced Simple@L5
xVid, Simple@L3
xVid, Advanced Simple@L5
This selection will cover a lot of files you might have in your archives. I’ll add more information as I find out.
– PersTechLife –
