How to turn your iPad into an HD media player for the TV

Jenneth Orantia
20 April 2011, 8:52 AM


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Got movies on your iPad that you want to watch with other people? Take advantage of the iPad's TV-out functionality in order to screen high-definition movies on your television.


The large 9.7-inch IPS display and generous 1,024 x 768-pixel resolution makes the iPad a great device to watch movies on. But if you want to watch the movie with the whole family, you’re better off using the iPad’s TV-out function to output the display to your television.

The first step is ensuring your iPad can play the movie through your TV. iOS doesn’t have a display mirroring feature like Windows 7, and instead limits the TV-out functionality to specific applications. The stock Videos app is one such program that can use the TV-out, but naturally it’s limited to playing movies that are in a supported format, namely H.264-encoded videos at up to 1,280 x 720 pixels and 30 frames per second.


Handbrake is the optimum video converter in our opinion, but there's still an easier way...

If your movies aren’t in this format (they could be in MKV, DivX, XviD or WMV, for example), there are two ways to get around it. First, you could transcode the movie to a supported format using a video formatting utility. We recommend Handbrake, as it’s free, supports Windows, Mac and Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora), and comes with built-in presets for converting videos for the iPad.

The downside to this approach is that you may experience some loss in quality with the final video, especially if the original was at a lower bit-rate and/or pixel resolution. It can also be time-consuming to transcode all of your movies, and having two versions of the same movie can quickly take up a lot of space on your hard drive.

A better option is using a third party video player that supports TV-out and can play most movies in their native format. Our favourite is CineXPlayer ($3.99), as it’s the cheapest and supports most of the main video formats. To transfer movies from your desktop to your iPad so you can play them back through CineXPlayer, you’ll need to transfer them through iTunes.

With your iPad connected to the computer, highlight the name of your iPad in iTunes and navigate to the Apps tab. A ‘File Sharing’ section at the bottom of the screen shows all of the apps that you can transfer documents to. Highlight CineXPlayer, and click the ‘Add’ button under CineXPlayer Documents. From there, you can select all of the movies that you’d like to play through CineXPlayer.

Note: the files you transfer here will only be visible by CineXPlayer, so if you have another video player that you want to use for watching movies, you’ll have to transfer each movie to that app specifically using the same process mentioned above, even if they’re already on your iPad in a different folder.

Once you’ve sorted out your video formats and software, the next step is to connect your iPad to the TV using one of the compatible video cables. Both the Apple Composite AV and Apple Component AV cables work with the iPad; if you want the best video quality, go for the component cable.

The final step is connecting the cable to your TV and plugging it into your iPad’s docking port. As soon as you open the movie player app (whether it’s Videos or CineXPlayer), your iPad will automatically detect that a TV-out cable is connected and will output the video (and accompanying soundtrack) to the TV.

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Jeff (User):

"The downside to this approach is that you may experience some loss in quality with the final video" -- APC

"you may" should be "you WILL" - it's the nature of lossy encoding and the only way to avoid it is to encode lossless (which is possible with h264), which will massively increase the bitrate, probably beyond what the ipad can even support...

20 April 2011, 9:52 AM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (Senior Forumologist):

i've been using mediacoder ipod edition to encode my files to MP4 for ipad and ATV2, and 576P seems like a good compromise for size, speed and quality.

I tested this via my ATV2 on my Sony 1080P LCD 32 inch, and the difference between 576P and 720P isn't all that obvious.

The thing i had to muck around with was the sound settings. the standard setting was very "flat" LC-HIGH was the setting i used.

Also the current ver of the software i use, and i'm guessing that it's probably a compatability issue with the Klite codec pack i use on my machines, but the CUDA encoder will crash when i trys to encode @ a greater res then 1008x576, (576P). encoding from 1080p to 576p, via CUDA, i get between 60-120FPS, were 720p-576p 180-220fps.

AND the latest ver has been updated to use Sandbridge Hardware accel. Would be interesting to see how fast that works.

It's a nice bit of software, (al be it a touch buggy), considering it's free.

Easier to set up, (well, if you're like me, and wanna tweek the settings), and faster then Handbreak too. And you can get it to watch a folder, and any new file it'll add to it's que to process.

20 April 2011, 11:33 AM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Jeff (User):

Quoting ss-rotel:
Easier to set up, (well, if you're like me, and wanna tweek the settings), and faster then Handbreak too

Well, mediacoder is CUDA based and probably designed for speed rather than quality, whereas with handbrake, which uses x264 - arguably the best h264 encoder there is, you can tune it to suit what you want and even moreso if you use x264 direct and will probably encode faster than mediacoder if you use the proper settings.

I believe that CUDA based encoders have restrictions on what resolutions you can encode to as well and GPU's are also simply not suited to a lot of the steps involved in encoding and, in fact, CPUs are much faster at those steps.

20 April 2011, 12:09 PM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (Senior Forumologist):

Quoting Jeff:
Well, mediacoder is CUDA based and probably designed for speed rather than quality


not based, it's an option. and as it glitched for me any higher then 576p in cuda, i was using x264 on normal @ 720p as a comparison. My Sony TV is maybe 12 months old, (actually it is 12months old, it was my last year b/day pressy to myself, and my b/day was last week), and it's arguabley clearer then my 50inch pana plasma.

there wasn't that much detail loss on the image, comparing the 2. Admidmitedly, my TV's probably upscaling.

conversion was close 2 1:1, so it took a while to convert. that said, i was using my server, which is only a AM2 9750. On my gaming rig, i've got a QX9650 OC to 4.2ghz, and 2x GTX465s, using cuda, @ 576p, converts nice and quick, about 5-6:1 conversion rate.

480p was noticably compressed.

and i'm talking converting 1080p and 720p MKV files, Dolby digital audio, which i set to lossless, and they all work flawlessly on my ipad2, my ATV2 via itunes homeshare, AND airplay to ATV2 via ipad, all on the same wifi network, with no dropouts.

Quoting Jeff:
I believe that CUDA based encoders have restrictions on what resolutions you can encode to as well and GPU's are also simply not suited to a lot of the steps involved in encoding and, in fact, CPUs are much faster at those steps.



i disagree, as i had no issues until i installed the latest ver of the coder software. Also, a GPU is effectively a maths processor, @ the end of the day. the CPU feeds it information, and it works out what colour a pixel should be. that's obviously a very simplified break down on what's going on.

I can't see you you come to the conclusion that a GPU can't encode faster that a CPU. best case, your CPU can calculate 12 pixels per cycle BEST case, (that's a i7-980, using hyperthreading), were my GTX465 card will process 352 pixels per cycle, WORST case.

Again, that's a very simplified break down, but i'm hopeing you get the idea.

(i'm pretty sure that right. SOME of that's educated guesswork. if you can prove me wrong PLEASE do so. in all honesty, i may have read about the above wrong. But when i save prove, i wanna see active links *grin*)

20 April 2011, 3:13 PM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (Senior Forumologist):

quote Jeff - you may" should be "you WILL" - it's the nature of lossy encoding and the only way to avoid it is to encode lossless (which is possible with h264), which will massively increase the bitrate, probably beyond what the ipad can even support...


Ahh, BUT the main reason to do this is to convert from one format to another, and most of them are already compressed anyway, so it's not going to be a big deal.

Personally, the differences in the audio is more pronoced then the image qual it's self.

20 April 2011, 11:44 AM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Jeff (User):

Quoting ss-rotel:
Ahh, BUT the main reason to do this is to convert from one format to another, and most of them are already compressed anyway, so it's not going to be a big deal.

Yeah the source is generally lossy, but that makes no difference - it will always end up with a lower quality than what you encode from, particularly if it's a lossless source or, at least with MPEG based encoders, from a non-mpeg source (since mpeg encoders are generally pretty good at replicating artifacts from the original and thus suffer less quality loss for the same bitrate).

20 April 2011, 11:58 AM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (Senior Forumologist):

Damn it... for whatever reason i can't respond to posts or edit my existing ones, as they dont show up... craziness..

quote Jeff - Well, mediacoder is CUDA based and probably designed for speed rather than quality


No, it's an option. and as, for whatever reason, i couldn't get the CUDA encoder to work over 576p, i was using the x264 encoded with the "CPU-Normal" setting to encode.

Was pretty much 1:1 conversion, and @ the end, it didn't really look that much better. considering CUDA was doing this at least 5-6times faster, and it didn't look that much better, i'm gunna use the CUDA encoder.

admitedly, i was using my server to convert using x264, and it's only an AM2 9750, and the comp i used to do cuda was my QX9650 OC'd to 4.2 using GTX465 for Grapix.

quote jeff - which uses x264 - arguably the best h264 encoder there is, you can tune it to suit what you want and even moreso if you use x264 direct and will probably encode faster than mediacoder if you use the proper settings


both mediacoder and handbrake are just GUI's that send the command string to the encoder. Infact you'd need to run a demuxer to convert the orginial file to RAW data first, then use the encodered to finish the convert.

i'd rather use a GUI that ran throu my batched files while i'm alseep, and lose a little bit of image quality that honestly my TV and AMP will upscale for me and fix anyway

quote - I believe that CUDA based encoders have restrictions on what resolutions you can encode to as well and GPU's are also simply not suited to a lot of the steps involved in encoding and, in fact, CPUs are much faster at those steps.


REALLY, video cards are baically maths processors. CPU feeds them information, and it works out what colour a pixel is. THAT's obviously a very simplifed overview on how that works.

My GTX465 will process 19.42GPS. so 19.42billion pixels per second. If my maths is correct, to get close to that you' d need an I7-995X and you'd get 21GPS.

$200ish video card, compaired to a $1300-$1400 CPU.

(i'm sure i'm right, at least, i'm sure my calculations are right, please correct me if i'm wrong. BUT i wanna see active links as proof!! *grin*)

20 April 2011, 9:39 PM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

Jeff (User):

Quoting ss-rotel:
REALLY, video cards are baically maths processors. CPU feeds them information, and it works out what colour a pixel is. THAT's obviously a very simplifed overview on how that works.

Vastly over simplified - completely ignores the fact that there are various motion estimations, motion tracking, quality calculations, etc. going on; the parts that actually get the massive compression h264 offers.


Quoting ss-rotel:
My GTX465 will process 19.42GPS. so 19.42billion pixels per second. If my maths is correct, to get close to that you' d need an I7-995X and you'd get 21GPS.

that's just raw theoretical throughput - not what you will actually get. Oh, and the calculation of pixels is just plain wrong - it doesn't work like that at all... and you are completely ignoring optimisations that can be done, and are, such as bit packing.

And yes, GPUs are great at floating point calculations and will walk all over a CPU for doing them, which makes them great for things like physics calculations, but for encoding, most (if not all) calculations are integer based and the only way GPUs can compete there is in shear parallelism. This is great for some applications, but not all steps lend themselves to parallelism, which is why you still have significant CPU load while encoding - because the CPU is simply better at some tasks. While may be faster under certain conditions (mainly because the CPU and GPU work in parallel), the quality doesn't compare.

You can have a look at doom9.org & doom10.org - plenty of threads in those forums about the subject if you're interested enough.

One that talks about integrating GPU processing into x264: http://doom10.org/index.php?topic=75.0
And you can always look through the #x264dev logs - CUDA encoding has come up many times: http://akuvian.org/src/x264/freenode-x264dev.log.bz2

21 April 2011, 1:29 AM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

ss-rotel (Senior Forumologist):

ok, i had a read of that, and the only thing really got from it was they were complaining that it's not cross plaform. Which is a stupid arguement, as CUDA is a nvidia only. ATI/AMD don't have an engine like this.

also, from what i gather, the issue that arises is a sync issue between CPU and GPU, or something.

And you're right, i did over simplified the calc, and explaination, as my more details explaination got "lost".

i assumed that the CPU had the ability to process 1 pixel per thread, and each thread could be processed per cycle. on an i7-995x, 6 cores, 3.6ghz that's about 21billion calcs per sec. we both know that's not how it works.

I didn't say that the CUDA was better, i said CUDA was faster. and it is. x264 does a nicer job @ encoding sure, but i personally couldn't see the difference in my setup, or my ipad, or my iphone, or on my sony bravia 32inch 1080p LCD via my ATV2.

i COULD see a diffence on my 24inch mon on my computer, as it's not upscaling the picture as well as it my other setups.

considering it was on average 6 times faster, for minimal picture quality gain, i'm going to keep using the CUDA encoder.


ANYway.... One thing that wasn't mentioned in the above article, is that you need either the component or HDMI converter cables to play this on the "big" screen. If you try and use the composite cable, you wont be able to play the video back. composite cables can only do 480i, (i think that's right), and i doubt an ipad/iphone4 is smart enough to downscale the signal.

26 April 2011, 10:25 PM (1 year ago)report abuse Send to a friend reply

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