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Best video player apps for ipad

A brand new video player, Fresh Video Player, has recently been released (AppStore link; $1.99). As its developers flooded quite a few iOS forums (for example, that of iPadForums) with their ads, I've found it necessary to thoroughly test the app to find out whether it's any good so that my readers are properly informed.

In a word: it isn't. It's, as of version 1.0, only recommended if (and only if!) you need a strictly iOS-based app to display the metadata of a video file. (This, as has been pointed out in the Video Metadata bible & Roundup, isn't at all supported by most other players.)


(The filelist view. Click the image for the full-sized version.)

The other (single) advantage it has is AC3 audio support – at least for now (as of version 1.0). However, I'm pretty sure it'll be removed in the near future, in subsequent (and REALLY needed) updates; that is, you shouldn't purchase the app because of the AC3 support. Particularly now that AVPlayer(HD) has been re-released to the AppStore with officially licensed (and, consequently, future-proof) AC3 support.

Needless to say, AVPlayer(HD) is really-really superior to Fresh Video Player. Its only disadvantages are the lack of Universal support (meaning you need to pay significantly more for the two separate versions if you want to run them on both your small- and large-screen iDevices), HTTP streaming and metadata display support. (Nevertheless, as I've also pointed out below in the Cons section, the HTTP support of Fresh Video Player isn't anything to write home about – there are a lot of other players with significantly better HTTP support.)

All in all, I in no way recommend this player in its current, initial version. (Hopefully subsequent versions will be bugfixed and enhanced.) Again, you should only consider it if, for some reason, you need an iOS-based player with metadata display support.

A detailed pros/cons list (note that I've published a full roundup / tutorial on almost every single bullet below. To fully understand what these bullets mean, you're supposed to read all those roundups.):

Pros:

- AC3 support!!!

- DTS support

- metadata display support; an example screenshot showing the metadata included in THIS file (provided in my Video Metadata bible & Roundup):


As you can see, almost everything is displayed, except for the embedded image.

- universal & 16:9 screen support (currently, the iPhone 5 / iPod touch 5)

Cons:

- absolutely no HW decoding for iOS-native file formats

- the above also means there's no non-Mirroring-based AirPlay support at all (and during mirrored streaming, it doesn't make use of the horizontal screen estate as opposed to several players like CineXPlayer (my dedicated, current post is HERE, which I may make into a full article some time). The horizontal screen estate isn't even fully utilized on the iPhone 5 / iPod touch 5, which have 16:9 screens but still leave a black bar around the image in mirrored mode

- no wired HDMI / VGA output (other than plain mirroring, which doesn't make use of the entire horizontal screen area either)

- no iPad 3/4 Retina screen support

- absolutely no subtitle support

- slowish H.264 decoder – forget anything over lower-bitrate 720p (or normal-bitrate Standard Definition)

- only HTTP streaming is supported (no UPnP / SMB / FTP) – by direct links only as there's not even a built-in Web browser in the app

- absolutely no (M)TS container support

- while it does support WMV files (WMV1, 2 and 3 are all supported), WMA Pro audio isn't supported, which renders many of the WMV files unplayable.

- no support for common audio formats like WAV, FLAC, APE, WV, Ogg.

- (audio-only) WMA is only partly supported: only one of my (non-Pro) simple test WMA's were played back properly

- even Camera MJPEG videos (at XGA resolution) are played back very choppily

- no hardware acceleration for MKV / AVI (either)

- no sorting, playlists etc. - the only file listing / organizing feature is file renaming and opening in other apps

- absolutely no gesture-based rewinding / fast forwarding support. (The two (rewind/ffwd) icons do step 15 seconds backward/forward.)

- no support for force-filling the entire screen (with the inevitable aspect ratio distortion) to make use of its entirety while not cropping out anything
 
Excellent multimedia player nPlayer updated – now, it's even more recommended

Guys, let me present you with another new, professional review you'll find useful (sorry, have to paste it here as no external links are allowed):


I've dedicated several articles to nPlayer, an excellent multimedia player with unique multi-subtitle capabilities (AppStore link; $2.99 (Universal version)).

Back then, the biggest problem with the player was the relatively slow H.264 decoder – top players like AVPlayer(HD) or It's Playing (or, in this respect, much better yaPlayer) have all had much better decoders. Because of that, I couldn't really recommend the player as a generic player for most purposes.


Fortunately, as opposed to many other players' update statements (see the above AppStore update screenshot – click for the enlargened version), the developers' claiming to have fixed this issue has turned out to be true: now, the playback speed is as good as that of the top players.

Taking into account that the player is indeed feature-packed, I can only recommend it (unless you need AC-3 audio support). It's well worth the price.

A more detailed pros / cons list (again, due to time / space constraints, I can't explain the background of all these bullets. I've dedicated a full tutorial / roundup to almost all of them. Please read my previous articles for more info on why, say, gesture-based fast forwarding / rewinding can greatly speed up seeking in a video or what one needs to know about playing back audio-only files.)

Pros

- the two biggest problem (low-quality/speed H.264 video decoder and buggy MKV subtitle rendering) of version 1.4 have been fixed. Now, A6(X)-based iDevices (iPhone 5, iPad 4) play back even 10 Mbps 1080p H.264 streams (like the Monsters test video) in software without really annoying stuttering or frame drops. (Unfortunately, earlier models, even including the A5(X)-based iPhone 4S and iPad 3/iPad mini, can't do the same – they drop frames and get the video and audio desynched after a while. With them, 720p is the maximum software-playable H.264 resolution.)

- hardware-accelerated, flawless MKV playback (added in version 1.4)

- support for video flipping (both horizontal and vertical) – few apps do the same (AVPlayer(HD) does – see its Tools menu)

- DTS audio support

- WMA (including Pro), WV, FLAC, WAV, Ogg Audio and Ape audio support; plays them back in background by default (you can enable the same for the audio track of videos in Settings > Videos > Plays In Background). Note that Ogg Audio and Ape streaming isn't supported, only local playback.

- dedicated fast forwarding / rewinding icons are large and their skipping interval can be independently(!) set between 5 and 300 secs in Settings > Fast Forward and Settings > Fast Backward

- access to both the iPod library and camera roll

- excellent (M)TS support ((European) DVB TS-wise, properly switches between 16:9 and 4:3; handles all subtitle and audio tracks and scrubbing.) Of course it won't play AC3 audio in original AVCHD MTS files or US DVB broadcasts.

- intelligent screen filling (not just “dumb†cropping zoom)

- flawless wired (HDMI / VGA) TV output, also with hardware-accelerated MKV files. (Note that some kinds of videos become choppy when played back via wired connections; for example, all my Standard Definition DVB TS test files. When not output to a TV, they're played back flawlessly on the same device, on the screen.)

- native (non-mirroring) AirPlay is supported for native iOS containers (all the other files can be played back in mirroring mode – with, of course, limited throughput and stuttering). For MKV files, playback is suffering from the same problem as with other “behind-the-curtains†MKV remuxers: plays about 10 seconds, then stops, loads the the next 10 seconds and restarts playing and so on. That is, MKV files can only be played in AirPlay mirroring mode (with its inherent, above-listed problems).

- good streaming support: FTP, UPnP, WebDAV / HTTP. (No SMB, though.) (Also see my UPnP bible for more info on its excellent UPnP support. Unfortunately, there is still no download support for UPnP in version 1.7. Also note that my audio streaming tests worked just great.)

- speedup / slowdown works with non-hardware-assisted playback too (useful with, say, podcasts).

- screen gestures configurable. For example, you can easily enable gesture-based fast forwarding / rewinding by overriding the default “Seek†setting by “Forward/Backward†in Settings > One Finger Gestures > Drag Horizontally. Then, it'll use the custom settings you set in Settings > Fast Forward / Backward (see above). Excellent!

Cons

- while it can zoom into videos (by selecting “Original size†in the zoom menu), you can't scroll around the zoomed video, unlike in It's Playing.

- no AC3

- still no VobSub support during hardware-assisted playback (see the section titled “Unfortunatelyâ in my last nPlayer-specific article)
 
Some news for you all (a cross-copy of my just-published article with external links removed):

New Version of Excellent Video Player AVPlayerHD out!

There is a lot of GREAT multimedia news. Let's start with one of the two best players, AVPlayerHD and It's Playing, which both have just received some major updates! After these two players, I quickly report on the new versions of some other players too.

AVPlayerHD 1.60

In several articles of mine (see e.g. my latest review and tips & tricks collection) I've mentioned AVPlayer(HD), an otherwise absolutely excellent multimedia player, had very limited FTP support. All it could do was simply downloading videos from FTP servers prior to playback, meaning absolutely no streaming capabilities.

Version 1.60, which has just been approved by Apple, to the rescue!


(AppStore update list. As with all the images in the article, click the link for the enlargened, original image.)

The new version, as its update notes states (see above), has greatly enhanced FTP support: now, it supports streaming over FTP and has a decent download manager.

(Currently, only the iPad version seems to have been approved (in Saturday evening, European time) – that is, the iPhone / iPod touch version is still at version 1.52.)

Unfortunately, there's still no UPnP or SMB (two much more widely used file access protocols) support in the app. However, adding full FTP streaming is definitely a step forward.

It's Playing 3.9

If you do need DSP's, the best player has too received excellent SMB support – and a brand new Settings screen where you can, among other things, make hardware playback default.

The file list (showing the remote list of an SMB server), with the new Settings icon in the bottom left:


The new Settings dialog:


The SMB buffering has been fixed. Among other things, it, in addition to showing the currently pre-buffered video (see the thin line just under the position slider), it also displays the speed it's downloading / buffering content. See the annotated meters in the top left corner for the latter:

Because of the sophisticated buffering support, I haven't encountered annoying pauses during playback over SMB (assuming I let the player sufficiently pre-buffer). And yes, it supports hardware playback of iDevice-native files. And, what is more, it can play back MKV's (assuming they're compatible, see remarks below) using hardware acceleration over SMB! No other AppStore player is able to do this – only the jailbroken XBMC.

Unfortunately, over SMB,

- while it lists the embedded subtitles in iDevice-native files, it doesn't render them;

- with some MKV's, it just stated it was unable to open them; for example, the standardized Monsters and Harry Potter test videos. Other MKV's (for example, the standardized Birds test video (link) or my AAC-only Kung Fu Hustle test video) were played back OK.

Note that the app also has a greatly enhanced desktop streamer client to, among other things, convert (non-supported) AC3 audio to AAC in runtime while streaming.

Unfortunately, the new version uses the CPU during hardware MKV playback as the old one (see my previous article for more info).

Fresh Player 1.1

The update notes of this - as of the initial (1.0) version, in no way recommended - player promise improved MKV playback:


(See the annotated sentence.)

Unfortunately, the new version isn't much better than the old one. Its MKV playback is still much-much inferior to the best players (AVPlayer(HD), nPlayer etc.). For that matter, it doesn't even support the Retina screen of the small-screen devices (iPhone 4+, iPod touch 4+), as you can clearly see in the following screenshot (see the badly pixelizated and aliased lines on the right and the girl's similarly pixelizated arm!):



All in all, it's still not recommended. There are much better players for the same price (or even less).

LuberPlayerHD 2.2.0

As you can check out in my previous review, the by far the biggest problem with this player was the lack of hardware decoding of iOS-native files.

The new version fixes this. Whenever you tap an iOS-native (mp4 / m4v / mov) video, a dialog box is displayed, letting you select from hardware and software decoding:



Unfortunately, the app hasn't really been fixed. For example, there is absolutely no iPad Retina support when using software decoding. That is, all the time, except for hardware mp4 / m4v / mov video playback. This alone makes the player useless for iPad 3 / 4 users. Not that I'd recommend the player to anyone else – for the same price ($3) or, in cases, for much-much cheaper, there are much-much better choices.

iMedia Player 2.0

I've always recommended iMedia Player, the free (as-supported), but still excellent player.

The major version bump, in addition to introducing file list manipulation and playlist capabilities, also added SMB support – something absolutely missing from earlier versions, as has also been pointed out in the chart (it's HERE - it's just a static chart link, NOT a link to my blog!) of my SMB bible.



I've very thoroughly tested the SMB support of the player and found out the following:

- it supports automatic discovery (unlike some other apps) in addition to manually adding a server
- it supports hardware-accelerated playback of iDevice-native formats (mov / mp4 / m4v), which is a definite plus
- it doesn't allow for manually fine-tuning pre-buffering. This means you may encounter buffering pauses during streaming as you can't instruct the player to pre-buffer as much as possible before starting the entire playback.

Two screenshots of the new SMB interface:


(server list + credentials dialog)


(remote file list)
 
Another crossposted article for today: Excellent multimedia player iMedia Player re-released as 'MPlayer' – with AC3 support!

As has been pointed out in my yesterday's article, iMedia Player is an excellent media player. Its developers have just debut with a separate, commercial ($2.99; AppStore link) app, MPlayer, (at least according to the devs) officially licensing the (E-)AC3 audio codec.


(AppStore description; also showing it being installed on my iPad after my purchasing it. As usual, click the image for the full-sized original.)

While, in the AppStore, the seller / developer names are totally different (based strictly on them, I wouldn't have thought the two players have anything to do with each other), in the just-released iMedia Player update you're actually taken to the new player in AppStore:


(a screenshot showing the dialog taking you to the new, AC3-friendly app in the AppStore. The background shows the biggest problem of both apps: the lack of Retina support - here, I try to play back my resolution tester MKV file with AC3 audio.)

There are absolutely no differences between the just-released MPlayer 1.0 and the newly-released iMedia Player 2.0 update, except for MPlayer's not being ad-supported and, of course, supporting AC3 audio.

This also means the pros / cons lists are the same for both apps (again, with the exception of AC3 support) – see below.

Do I recommend it over AVPlayer(HD), the other player to officially support AC3? (As far as AppStore, that is, non-jailbroken players are concerned, of course. For jailbroken devices, I highly recommend the basically (you won't need to purchase the IAP if you don't need access to the icons in the filelist view – playback works just great without them) free RushPlayer+ and the completely free XBMC. Just keep in mind that XBMC has a little bit lower-quality H.264 / WMV / MKV decoder than the best titles out there.)

Well, if you don't have a Retina device (anything newer than an iPhone 3GS, a 3rd-gen iPod touch, an iPad 2, not counting in the non-Retina iPad mini) and/or you don't want to play back any video in software and/or if you don't plan to play back high-resolution videos, then, this player can prove handy, particularly if you need SMB streaming or HTTP (Web) streaming / access / download, which AVPlayer(HD) entirely lacks. Otherwise (apart from the major problem of the lack of Retina support), the two players are pretty comparable. If you have both small-screen devices and iPads, MPlayer may be a better choice because you'll only need to pay once (the player being Universal), unlike with AVPlayer.

However, do keep in mind that any time you'll need to rely on software decoding of high-resolution videos, the resolution will greatly suffer on anything Retina. In this regard, AVPlayer and AVPlayerHD are far better. Also, they lead in their MKV (MPlayer doesn't support MKV playback in hardware) and the newly-enhanced (see my yesterday's article) FTP support.

The pros / cons list of MPlayer (the same applies to the free iMedia Player – except for the AC3 support, of course):

Cons

The biggest one: No Retina support on anything (both small-screen devices and the iPad 3/4) while software decoding (no such problem with HW-decoded, that is, iOS-native videos)
No CC support in native videos (albeit they're played back in hardware)
No full SSA subtitle support (text subs are supported)
Pretty weak DVB TS support (no scrubbing support, doesn't detect 16:9 videos (renders everything in 4:3); while it renders DVB subtitles, it shows them over a pretty ugly background; interlaced fields are merged in a very ugly way when there's a lot of movement in the frame)
No filelist sorting
No metadata display

Pros

Official(!) AC3 support
Universal
Playlist support
Excellent (fast) H.264 decoder – the player can (unless battery life is important) be used to play back even 1080p MKV videos
Very fast and compatible WMV decoder (no WMA Pro audio support, though)
Gesture-based ffwd / rewind support (20 secs in both directions; unfortunately, can't be configured)
DTS support
Absolutely flawless 1080i60 (ATSC) playback (no scrubbing / subtitle support, though)
Passcode lock support
Support for mp3 / ogg audio tracks
Audio file playback-wise, WMA (but no WMA Pro!), FLAC, APE and WAV audio too (no WV or OGA files, though)
 
And another review:

Review: Media Player 'iMPlayer'


A fairly new entry to the iOS media player scene is iMPlayer (AppStore links: small-screen version; iPad version. Both cost $2.99). I've reviewed the current (1.3.0) version.


(AppStore page; also showing it being installed on my iPhone 5 after my purchase. As usual, click the image for an enlargened version.)

In the pros / cons section below, I've elaborated on the player very thoroughly. To recap all those: in a word: I do NOT recommend this player, unless you really need adding / managing bookmarks in videos. It's just too weak (while, taking its pretty bad performance into account, heavily overpriced).

The only advantage of the player is the ability to add bookmarks anywhere, in any kind of a video, along with a small framegrab of the video. Unfortunately, very few other players are capable of this. An example using the standard Monsters MKV test video (link):



Incidentally,

1, the screenshot above also shows there's no Retina support when software decoding is used; hence the low resolution

2, also, pay special attention to the errors the (very weak) H.264 decoder of the app is introducing to the decoded frame. For example, to the left of the green animal (or whatever) on the left, you can see rectangle-shaped green blotches – those have been introduced by the decoder. (The second thumbnail at the bottom also shows such problems.)

3, should you want to manually back up (or migrate to another iDevice) your bookmarks, they're under Library/BookmarkDir, directly accessible via, say, iExplorer. A screenshot of the above-listed Monsters thumbnails (along with some other ones):

iMPlayer-bookmarksinfs.png


The detailed pros / cons lists:

Cons

Software-decoded videos are played back in low-res on Retina screens
Non-Universal, which is further made worse by the high price
No AC3
No DTS
Absolutely no streaming support
Absolutely no support for audio-only files (WMA, FLAC, APE, WAV, WV, OGA stb.)
Absolutely useless (very slow) H.264 decoder
No MKV hardware playback
Absolutely no SSA subtitle support
Absolutely no textual subtitle support in MKV files (see Monsters)
No gesture-based ffwd / rewinding
No playlists (however, you can still create folders in the app)

Pros

Excellent, unique bookmark support
iOS-native files are played back in hardware (and with Retina-friendly resolution)
Apple CC tracks displayed in iOS-native files
Good WMV support (also WMA Pro) – albeit not as fast as that of, say, AVPlayer.
Tolerable DVB TS support if you don't need subs / multiple audio tracks (scrubbing and aspect ratio changes supported; however, merging the interlaced frames is very ugly when there's plenty of movement on screen. There's no subtitle rendering or audio track changing.)
 
lhamilton said:
I tried nplayer recently and found I'd wasted my money. It won't access my dlink sharecenter NAS.
Click to expand...

Nplayer never responded to,my query but I've found that if I use SMB/CIFS instead, I can access my NAS. It can play some mkvs but not those with dts encoding.

Then I upgraded my FileExplorer to the non-free version and it plays everything including dts! I also like FileExplorer because it lets me browse my epub books on the NAS and import them into my ipad book browser.

Linda
 
Beards said:
That is not VDownloader nor is it a Video Player. That is Downloader Lite an app for downloading files.
Click to expand...

I meant this one bt messed up with the link with that lite version....
 

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