Multimedia Apps for iPad

In this post, we will see some the best multimedia applications for iPad. I am sure that watching videos or photos or listening to music is in the top of your mind while buying an iPad. There are plenty of applications which do this but it is important to choose the right apps for playing your favorite media files which may be in different formats.

Following are the list of multimedia applications which I found good enough to satisfy these needs.

Video:

1. AV Player HD
2. CineX player
3. Plex (http://www.plexapp.com/ios.php)
4. TVU
5. iMovie

Music

1. TuneIn Radio
2. Desi Radio
3. Sound Hound / ( Shazam)
4. Music Video

Photos

1. FlickStackr
2. Eyewitness (Guardian)
3. 50Best Photos from National Geography
4. Fotopedia (Colors, Paris, National Parks)
5. Art Authority (paintings from all over the World)

AVPlayer HD

If you have a collection of movies or videos in different formats including .mkv and want to play in iPad install AV Player HD. It is easy to use, paly most of the video and audio formats mkv, mp4, flv, avi and .mov, supports subtitle and plays 1080P video. Video files can be transferred wirelessly to iPad from the PC or any other source. Apart from Wi-Fi you can use either FTP or USB connection for file transfer. 

It supports hardware acceleration and has taken multi touch to a new level. You can even delay or advance the subtitle timings to match with the video. Overall it is a must application if you want to play movies on iPad.

Plex Application

I have discussed Plex apps in one of my earlier article. Let me add this for easy reference.

Plex media consists of a server application and clien apps. You can download Plex media server (www.plexsapp.com ),a free apps and install it in your desktop (Windows / MAC) show it the network drive where you have stored your media files. It will scan all the movie files and access Internet sites to pull out all these information (called meta data) and comes out with a very neat catalog with all features you wanted. This is a CPU intensive job and requires lots of disk access, so expect very low response from your Destop during the analysis part of the operation.

Now to access this from your iOS devices or Android phones you need to buy a Plex client software ($4.99/-) and the catalog appears in your screen and click the cover picture to play the video. The following pictures explain all in detail is reproduced here from my Home Network after I ran Plex in one my directories storing movies. No hassles of transcoding or splitting files. It does all these for all movies even for Hindi and regional language movies too J First figure shows the server software followed by client running in iPad.

CineX Player

When our favorite VLC Player was pulled off from iTunes Store CineX player came for our rescue. It is not as versatile as VLC but satisfies most of our needs.

 

 

 

TVU

TVU Networks brings you a live TV service with 1000 channels from around the world. Now, the same great stuff that you watch on TVU on your PC, is available right here on your iPad/ iPhone through WiFi and now, 3G Most of the Indian TV channels are supported.

TuneIn Radio

TuneIn Radio brings 50,000 radio stations all over World to your iPad. The same app is available in other platforms including Android. It supports both AM and FM stations. It allows you to even record and purchase the songs you like. The GUI is good with seamless transitions from one screen to other. You can search for your favorite station too. The quality of audio is very good at reasonable broadband speeds.

 

Desi Radio

As the name suggests Desi Radio is for listening to radio stations in Indian languages, apart from Hindi and English there are plenty of stations in Tamil, Telugu and to some extent Malayalam. The selections in other regional languages are limited. The Gui is decent and pricing is fine, free.

Sound Hound
If you are into Western music SoundHound is for you. SoundHound takes Shazam's pioneering song-recognition approach to a whole new level, letting you not only identify recorded songs, but also use your own voice to generate a result. For those who are new to both just think that it is a music search and recognition application.

SoundHound's interface offers quite a bit more content on iPad than Shazam, letting you read song lyrics, flip to artist and album pages. It helps to find dozens of similar artists. SoundHound also loads up several YouTube videos and includes a voice search feature. It's an impressive set of features built around identifying and discovering new artists and songs. For a detailed review read http://www.mymac.com/2011/09/soundhound-review/

Shazam is a free download from last week to counter the popularity of SoundHound.

Flickstackr

Flickstrackr is the best Flicker application for iPad. It is the best way to explore Flicker. This application is updated quite frequently with new features.

Guardian Eyewitnes

Guardian Eyewitness is an iPad application where you get one new excellent photo per day. I am sure that you will love these photos. The layout and GUI are very attractive to show the photos. Once you connect, it will download and store locally. So all the previous photos are readily available to download at any time.