iPad is a great device to watch movies. But you can’t watch movies on it with your whole family. Good thing, the iPad can now is turned into an HD media player with its TV-out functionality. The steps are listed below:
Step 1: Ensuring the playable format
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. The format must be in MKV, DivX, XviD or WMV.
Step 2: Formatting the movie file if it’s not in a playable format
There are two ways to format the movie file. One is 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.
But 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.
Another option is using a third party video player that supports TV-out and can play most movies in their native format. Our favorite is CineXPlayer 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.
Step 3: Connecting your iPad to the TV
Once you’ve sorted out your video formats and software, you can now 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.
Step 4: Connecting the cable to your TV
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.
More on handbrake here.
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