As usual, Apple have made a piece of hardware that I love but again they're so bloody greedy they won't put anything in it that might take sales away from their accursed itunes store.
I have metaphorical buckets full of multimedia from my many years in the PC wilderness, and I want them to play them on my iPad.
I want them ON the iPad, not streamed through the very good Air Video.
I don't really want to have to convert them, taking hours and consuming vast CPU cycles when they're already in some cases perfectly good 720p or 1080i/p MKV video, or XVID or whatever.

Am I going to have to jailbreak it to be able to play any of these?
Is there really no other way?

Thanks.
Diz.

Download and install Handbrake and then leave it to convert everything to MP4 overnight...

Or try xyplayer from the app store (be warned, it costs £3 and the reviews haven't been that good...)

I'd go with the conversion route as well, plus a lot of modern hardware is optimised for decoding H.264 MPEGs, so you will see better playback performance and less battery drain.

I tried xyplayer and it's utterly useless. (I found it shortly after I posted this thread, before it was mentioned here).
It has a framerate of about 3 or perhaps 4 frames per second. Perhaps the most useless £3 I've ever spent.

I will have to use Handbrake and convert everything then. What a drag.
Thanks all.

Steve Jobs like 'open' systems

AVI was introduced by Microsoft and is a very common container for DivX and Xvid files...it certainly isn't open. MP4 is ISO standard 14496-14:2003 however...

Brilliant. Meanwhile from an end user point of view a device which doesnt allow several common video formats to be played will be viewed as very much closed.

The end user fits into one of two categories

a) doesn't know MP4 or XVid from a poke in the eye but won't have any media to transfer that's not ipod compatible anyway so it's not an issue.

b) Does know MP4 from Xvid but, given it's been widely publicised for years what media the idevices do or do not play should maybe apply a bit of caveat emptor.

Diz, your best bet is probably to jailbreak it and go in search of a player that way. I understand that's a one-click job on an iPad already.

DivX is made of win, that fact that the iPad doesn't support it is a deal-breaker for me.

I have to say I find it quite amusing that you'd expect a device with a low power processor handle a full HD video with 5 times more pixels than the device can even show in a format that would probably not be supported in hardware acceleration.

I'd be very impressed if any app on a jail broken iPad could handle 1080p Xvid at bearable frame rates. Plus, it would take nearly as long to copy the huge files over as it would to down-convert them.

I have to convert video to a suitable format if I want to play it on my phone or mp3 player. Since the iPad is just a big iPod, I'd totally expect you to have to do the same.

The iPhone and iPod Touch won't sync HD video in H.264 format. It will take iPod sized video or SD video, but HD video won't be synced - I have Krod Mandoon in HD from the iTunes Store and that gets converted down for the iPhone, but HD podcasts won't transfer.

I dont agree with that at all. The fact is there's loads of content out there which for whatever reason doesnt play on Apple devices. In the meatime Jobs likes to blather on about open systems. I find that hypocritical. Whether Jobs thinks Xvix, DivX, AVI, or anything else is 'open' or not the fact they dont allow playback on his devices make them very much closed.

I don't think he does, or at least he doesn't to my knowledge. He likes open standards, implemented by proprietary (or closed) devices.

And thats the bit I find hypocritical I guess, that he likes open standards on his closed systems.

I don't quite see the problem with it. Maybe that'll tarnish me with the fanboi brush. If you have the perfect Jobsian model of the world then lots of manufacturers all make their own products that do different things in different ways, but can all use the same data and infrastucture, and happily co-exist.