Video Preview of VLC for iPad
Yesterday, we noted that the popular open source media player VLC has been ported to the iPad and that the application has been submitted to Apple for review.
AppAdvice has been able to get its hands on the application and has
posted an overview and a brief video showing it in action.
It performs very well, and all your DivX and Xvid files will play smoothly and normally, displaying all their original quality. It also supports a bunch of other formats, and it's extremely simple to use. As for the interface, it's nice and polished.
However, there are certain limitations, as less popular formats and high definition videos don't play as well. I'm confident there is still some room to improve the codecs, but since your videos are decoded at the software level, we're probably limited by the iPad's raw power. Also, it won't read Windows media files if anybody still uses them.
File management is handled directly via iTunes, and video libraries are displayed as thumbnails sitting on "shelves", offering a smooth browsing experience. The app's developers are hopeful that it could appear in the App Store as soon as next week, although it is of course subject to Apple's sometimes-unpredictable review process.
Update: Wired's Charlie Sorrel has also posted a hands-on review of VLC for iPad, noting a few performance and compatibility issues but overall finding it to be "way more polished than any other video app [he has] yet seen on the tablet".
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
