XBMC And The iPad

Have an iPad and frustrated by its inability to play certain files? Well so was our friend Damian who loves all sorts of video filetypes, so he jailbroke his wife’s iPad (now that’s love, huh) and threw XBMC on it. From the initial results, looks to be pretty sweet, although the interface clearly wasn’t designed for touch…yet.

This is the area I was most interested in. Until now I could only play H264 mp4 files natively. For my other files (mkv, avi) I was  required to use a transcoding app (such as Air Video). The downside to this is that this process is very CPU intensive and has never been a 100% reliable for me. Using XBMC not only adds support for formats the iPxx doesn’t natively support, but also allows for full hardware acceleration which means a much more friendly process for my Windows Home Server CPU. Less stress on a CPU can only be a good thing as it will lead to less heat and also give better energy efficiency.

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