Expert Blogs
If you have ever purchased a movie (TV show etc.) from the iTunes Store, you may already have noticed it has some additional metadata (description, staff listing etc.) nicely rendered in the desktop iTunes:
(desktop iTunes, Men in Black. As with all the images in this article, click the thumbnail for the original, high-quality image.)
If you don't jailbreak (ruling out XBMC and RushPlayer+) and do need hardware video playback of iOS-native files with AC3 audio (which rules out the software-only 8player – see THIS), your only choice is, currently, CineXPlayer for movies containing AC3 audio.
Over at MacRumors (thread), I've been asked to compile a list of players that can vertically stretch a video so that it entirely fills the iPad's screen. During this, it does sacrifice the right aspect ratio and does distort the image. However, at least it doesn't cut off the sides.
Here's a 16:9 movie (my well-known resolution chart video available for download HERE) not filling in the (much taller) screen vertically in the built-in stock Videos app:
yaPlayer (AppStore link), an absolutely stunning excellent video player when it comes to H.264 and MPEG-2 playback (main review; last piece of news), has just become free – along with some new features and bugfixes. Now, there is no point in NOT downloading it – after all, what can you lose? It won't cost you anything.
With Google's own YouTube client, the biggest problem has always been the lack of Closed Caption (CC; a.k.a. subtitle) support. It was in no way possible to display subtitles in a video, not even in the latest iOS version (still) having the client built-in. Not so with the recently-released, updated, iPad- and widescreen-friendly, free(!!) YouTube client (AppStore link), which shows a CC icon, making it possible to activate CC's, in Landscape orientation on all models and Portrait orientation on iPads:
As it doesn't have any kind of non-UPnP playback (that is, it can't play back local files), I haven't evaluated ArkMC (AppStore link; $2.99, Universal) in my UPnP bible listing and comparing all regular multimedia players (also with) UPnP capabilities.
The multimedia player Gplayer (AppStore link) has always belonged to the “also run” category. It doesn't really have anything outstanding or unique – no wonder it hasn't become a winner in any of my full roundups (UPnP, SMB, WMV, Silverlight streaming, MKV etc.).
Nevertheless, if you do want to use it, you'll be delighted to hear it has just received iPhone 5 (iPod touch 5) screen support:
I've published several articles on “remuxing” video converters, which make it possible to convert a lot of videos very quickly for consuming on iOS. Generally, with today's most widely used video formats (H.264), this only involves converting the audio (if it's not already AAC) and changing the container.
So far, the two remuxers I've recommended the most were the free Subler and (strictly the beta version of) MP4Tools. They're very fast and astonishingly useful tools.
Just some minutes ago, the small-screen version of the “Oplayer” multimedia player has received an update. The update notes are as follows:
(as with all the other images in this review, click for an enlargened, better-quality version)
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