iPad Supports .AVI M-JPEG Video
We didn’t notice this until @pivale pointed us towards PCWorld’s article, but sure enough according to Apple’s iPad tech specs, the iPad does indeed support a type of .AVI video:
Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format
No .AVI support of any kind is listed under iPhone or iPod touch tech specs. (Then again, none of those devices are running iPhone 3.2 like the iPad — yet).
.AVI, the audio-video interleave is a container introduced by Microsoft. Motion JPEG is a type of .AVI compression. While .AVI in general is ubiquitous for standard definition video content on the internet, there’s no indication Apple is supporting the specific XviD codec (encoding/decoding) used by those files.
In other words, and as pointed out in comments below, this will help owners of some types of video cameras watch their footage via the camera card reader accessory, it won’t let anyone watch their bootleg movies on the iPad.
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Wait,
What does Rene mean by “support a type of .AVI video” Seems to be implying that with 3.2 the iPhone will support avi video? If that’s the case all I have to say is WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!
Higher quality and don’t have to spend time converting to mp4
They probably added that because of the camera USB/SD card adapter and many digital cameras record video in Motion JPEG with PCM audio.
It is horribly inefficient in terms of compression, but it is one way of watching video on the Nintendo Wii (out of the box) from SD cards as well. Half an hour of high quality video comes out at about 1.5GB in my experience.
“What does Rene mean by “support a type of .AVI video” Seems to be implying that with 3.2 the iPhone will support avi video? If that’s the case all I have to say is WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!”
It doesn’t mean what you think it means. .avi is a container, a wrapper, the video inside of it can have any different number of codecs. If you’re thinking of putting videos you downloaded from the web forget it. Most are coded using XviD or DivX.
Yeah, this is the type of video files that my point and shoot Canon digital camera (4 years old) produces. Not terribly space efficient but is pretty high quality.
For the movies and all kinds of non-iPhone-friendly media, there’s always AirVideo.
I had a camera that used AVI MJPEG. The files were huge.
I was getting all excited, thought I was gonna have to rethink not getting one
this was the exact reason i decided against the iPad, I HATE! having to convert video to use on one device. the Archos tablets play everything (AVI, MKV, MP4, you name it) as soon as the 7 inch Archos is available thats what i am ordering.
Hey! Is it going to support .avi or not? I’m, of course, thinking in watching the videos I’ve downloaded from internet and torrents, and I used to avoid Xvid and all those because converting them to mp4 is a pain in the ***. Anyways, if the iPad is going to support .avi there’s no need to worry… However, I’ve seen that there are more and more .mkv files now, I hope that doesn’t make any problem…
iPad 3g will suport avi,but genanar ipad can not play avi.
Sorry for iPad’s functions, it won’t support AVI format, so you have to convert AVI to iPad for playing freely. Here, you can find the wonderful AVI to iPad Converter, whether you are a Mac or Windows user, u can get best solution here.
If you use toast you can easily convert avi to itunes format and play the movie through itunes.
If you have any question about convert AVI files to iPad, just look at this guide: Love iPad’s Life!
Some Mac users might not that knowledgeable about video file formats. In other words, iPad supports some types of video cameras watch their AVI footage via the camera card reader accessory, it won’t let you watch downloaded AVI movies on the iPad. If you want to play AVI movies downloaded from the internet on you iPad or iPad 3G, you can convert your AVI files to iPad friendly format.
Just use good reader. No need to convert.
You may try iskysoft video converter for Mac. It has added support for Apple iPad recently. So it can convert AVI to iPad. You can learn more about it from
Anyways, if the iPad is going to support .avi there’s no need to worry.