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you could also use an ipod classic.
Ok, it doesn't have 500 gb, but it still has its own battery.
I can confirm this ipod method works.
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I've tried the iPod classic method. It works, but the battery on it went from about 80% to empty in less than an hour and a half, watching just SD content. Possibly my iPod battery is defective, it's a 120gb version a couple of years old. Does yours last longer?
I've tried many methods so far. Before this drive, I was storing content on SD cards and small USB sticks (each 32gb) and connecting using the camera connection kit. However, they have to be formatted fat32 to be recognized, which means I can't put anything over 4gb on them.
This drive solves for that too.
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Interesting, I've never heard of that method, it's pretty clever. Thanks for pointing it out.
However, my aim is to not have to manipulate files in order to play them on the iPad. If I'm going to have to change each file in order to get it to play, I may as well transcode it completely into an apple friendly format.
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All good tips! Sounds perfect for an XBMC wiki page about getting more storage for the iPad version while on the go. Also, that's kind of awesome to see what is basically a small 500 GB wireless file server that runs off of an internal battery!
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Pocalypse Wrote:I've tried the iPod classic method. It works, but the battery on it went from about 80% to empty in less than an hour and a half, watching just SD content. Possibly my iPod battery is defective, it's a 120gb version a couple of years old. Does yours last longer?
I've tried many methods so far. Before this drive, I was storing content on SD cards and small USB sticks (each 32gb) and connecting using the camera connection kit. However, they have to be formatted fat32 to be recognized, which means I can't put anything over 4gb on them.
This drive solves for that too.
I don't know about the time, but when my sister was playing a movie of 1 hours and 33 minutes it lasted long enough with extra juice left. It was an ipod 6G iirc, 160GB.
Maybe it's because the screen brightness set on the ipod?
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You may want to doublecheck the RAR suggestion. I heard that XBMC can play downloaded RAR files just fine. But that's because apparently, most groups are using RAR as a splitter and container with NO compression.
Try a compressed RAR movie file and let us know if XBMC can play back those. I didn't look into this further...but that was my understanding.
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2011-10-18, 01:41
(This post was last modified: 2011-10-18, 04:46 by Ned Scott.)
You can probably dramatically increase battery life by increasing the buffer size, or even manually copying the movie over using iFile, then start watching it in XBMC even before it's done. Right now the HDD is constantly running during the movie, rather than just transferring the needed data to the iPad and then spinning down/power saving.
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Pocalypse Wrote:Forgive my ignorance, but how can I increase the buffer size? I don't see an option for this in the xbmc settings.
There's no GUI setting for it, but it can be set in the advancedsettings.xml file.
However, I see there that the cache is loaded in RAM (which I should have assumed), so it wouldn't help to increase it as the iPad, since iOS devices don't have a lot of RAM. Increasing that setting would likely crash XBMC.
I guess what would be neat is some kind of add-on for this kind of situation that would automate copying over the file from the wifi HDD to the iPad as a kind of cache/buffer, and then clear out the file after playback. The time it takes to transfer the file over is less time than the length of the movie, so the Wifi HDD is spinning for a lot less time if it only copies and then plays, rather than playing as it streams.