Play DivX movies on your iPad

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If you have an iPad and watch your video collection on it, you probably know the pain involved in converting the videos to a format playable by the device. Wouldn’t it be great if you could play the video files without the need to convert them?

Good news! You now have two ways to do so:

CineXPlayer [Free, iTunes Link]

The app showed up on the app store today. It can play your DivX and XviD video files. To transfer the files you need to use the iTunes file sharing feature. Here is how:

• Connect the iPad and open up iTunes
• Select your iPad in the left menu
• Click on Apps tab
• Scroll down and you will see the file sharing section. Here you can transfer files to your iPad

The app can play your downloaded video files. However, currently it does not support .mkv files and files with AC3 audio. I believe they will be supported in future versions.

AirVideo [$2.99, iTunes Link]

The app is totally worth the $2.99 you will shell out for it. The beauty with this app is that you can stream videos directly from your computer. This means no space needed on the iPad to transfer those huge video files!

To use the app, you will need wifi (you probably have one if you have an iPad) and will have to install a free AirVideo server on your machine which is available for download here. To configure, follow these steps:

• Add the folders containing your video files in the server
• Fire up the app on your iPad and add a new server using your computer’s wifi IP address
• Configured the server to start with your OS

That’s it! You can now enjoy videos without even the need to transfer them to your iPad. You have two options to play the videos – Using live conversion or, after fully converting the video file. Don’t worry, you can queue the videos for conversion directly from the app. This feature is useful when you have a slow computer and you experience delay in playing video over live conversion. A decently configured computer (Core 2 Duo or higher with >=2GB of RAM) is recommended for good performance with live conversion.

AirVideo supports all file formats and has options to select audio track and subtitles. To play videos with subtitles, you have to place them in the same folder as the video and give them the same name as the video file with the extension “.srt”.

What’s more? If you know how to forward ports on your router and register for a DDNS service such as No-IP, you can even access your videos on the go from anywhere in the world!

If you want to test AirVideo before buying it, you can check out the free version [iTunes Link] which limits the number of files displayed in the app.