Considering buying an iPad2. Have been looking at various apps which stream video to the ipad from your home network. Most of them have a PC-side server which transcodes the video to an ipad-friendly format. (as ipad dosen't natively do MKV, as we all know).
Most of these apps need a fairly formiddable PC to do the transcoding, but I came across a video on YouTube today of a guy demo'ing XBMC on iPad2, playing a 16GB MKV of Transformers remotely from his PC, and it looked flawless.
Was I dreaming? Or is this actually possible? Of all the apps I've researched (other than xbmc), they all have quite a lot of caveats and niggles/dependencies, but this video just completely sold it to me. He mentioned hardware-decoding being present (presumably this means using both cores of the iPad A5 cpu). --does it also involve the GPU at all?
Basically I'm just wanting to check this is legit, because it would take a hell of a lot of headaches out of playing my collection on an iPad.
If it's true, I'm incredibly impressed how far along xbmc for iOS has come.
Here's the video (the guy has a Core2Duo PC):
http://youtu.be/LJ4wgq8BEBA
All of my HD content is sat on my Atom-based ASRock330 PC. So it's not a powerful machine at all. But from the video above (where no transcoding is happening), he has a Core2Duo PC. How much would it effect my chances of streaming 1080p,HiProf,HiBitrate,MultiChannel MKV videos successfully to the iPad?
Greatful for anyone who can help/advise.
Most of these apps need a fairly formiddable PC to do the transcoding, but I came across a video on YouTube today of a guy demo'ing XBMC on iPad2, playing a 16GB MKV of Transformers remotely from his PC, and it looked flawless.
Was I dreaming? Or is this actually possible? Of all the apps I've researched (other than xbmc), they all have quite a lot of caveats and niggles/dependencies, but this video just completely sold it to me. He mentioned hardware-decoding being present (presumably this means using both cores of the iPad A5 cpu). --does it also involve the GPU at all?
Basically I'm just wanting to check this is legit, because it would take a hell of a lot of headaches out of playing my collection on an iPad.
If it's true, I'm incredibly impressed how far along xbmc for iOS has come.
Here's the video (the guy has a Core2Duo PC):
http://youtu.be/LJ4wgq8BEBA
All of my HD content is sat on my Atom-based ASRock330 PC. So it's not a powerful machine at all. But from the video above (where no transcoding is happening), he has a Core2Duo PC. How much would it effect my chances of streaming 1080p,HiProf,HiBitrate,MultiChannel MKV videos successfully to the iPad?
Greatful for anyone who can help/advise.
