Ola! I have a large collection of MKV films on my NAS, which I watch on my telly via a WDTV Live. They're streamed via the MiniDLNA plugin running on the NAS. Can I watch these films on my iPad in a similar manner? Thanks in advance! Cleggy.
I seem to remember a program you could use that would encode movies on the fly (if your nas has a processor) if they were incompatible with the device, can't remember what it was called though.
AVPlayerHD should work, astleast for 720p. 1080p isn't possible tho, with any player on the iPad. Another option would be XBMC, but that would require a jailbreak. The only option to deal with 1080p on a not jailbroken iPad is to convert the files from mkv into mp4 using H.264 and AAC codecs. The problem is, that no other player then Apples own video-player can make any use of hardware video-decoding on th iPad, so anything else relies 100% on the CPU and that's not enough to replay these files with high bitrates.
Air Playit HD, I have it on my folding machine which is on 24x7 and it encodes everything up to and including 1080p and streams it from my NAS to my iPad. It is completely free, but uses its own specialised app on the PC, no PS3 media server or anything like that so unlikely to get this running off the NAS. (although I have not looked into this)
Cheers folks, I ended up installing an app called BuzzPlayer. Sounds amateur but its great, and gives me direct access to all my media on the NAS. Just need to get better wifi now...
That's not entirely accurate. Apple's video player with use GPU decoding for H.264 (And others but by no means exhaustive) and will therefore play 1080 quite happily. Developers using apple's playback code inherit all of this capability and therefore have exactly the same access to hardware acceleration as Apple. But... If you're a developer who wants write their own decoder then the code for this decoder will have to run on CPU. There's no evidence that Apple can run arbitrary code on the GPU. The hardware acceleration they use is from code burned into the GPU chipset, just like it is on any platform. So yes you're restricted to software decoding if writing your own decoder, but you don't lose any performance in decoding H.264 in a native apple app or a third party.
I'll throw another praise for BuzzPlayer in here too. Direct access to SMB shares makes playing from a nas a breeze.
