iPad media file issue

[WalksWithChrist]

I'm looking for a reliable way to transfer media (pictures and video) off an iPad 3. I was using the Windows 7 picture import utility and that mostly works. I originally tried transferring the files manually (copy and paste) but the file transfer would randomly stop. I take large batches of pix and vids...so that's no good.

The only problem with using the import utility with Windows 7 is that the videos will only play normally with Windows Media Player. If I use VLC or anything else, the video stutters very badly.

What I did do was use my Windows 8 laptop (my wife's has Windows 7 and it was the one that I primarily used to store media...yes, there is a backup on my external hard drive) one time to transfer files and I noticed that videos played normally on VLC. So I thought the Windows 8 import app fixed the problem.

Then my wife told me the video I had just transferred to her laptop still stuttered. I checked again and it plays fine using VLC on Windows 8, but not using VLC on Windows 7. Both laptops have been recently updated via Windows Update.

I'm sure all that was pretty hard to follow! Any input?

 

[Qyöt27]

Any number of things could cause it:

• the laptops' respective specs
• the format, resolution, and framerate of the video files
• the trustworthiness of the USB (or other) port used to actually transfer the data (in the case of transfers suddenly stopping)
• if the import utility is actually doing a format conversion during the transfer process (which can end up causing other problems down the line, too)
• VLC's versioning - if they aren't the same version, then the behavior might be fixed simply by updating to the latest version
• depending on the format, whether hardware acceleration is fully usable from within libavcodec (particularly, this could be an issue if the import utility converted the videos to VC-1 - a.k.a. WMV9 - during the transfer process; it's expected that WMP would play them without issues, but I have no hard numbers on the level of performance for libavcodec's VC-1 decoder or if it can use hardware accel on them)

Unfortunately, the only thing I can help to diagnose is the format stuff. Grab Mediainfo (here; it's also apparently in the Mac App Store but I don't know if it's available for iOS devices like the iPad) and run it on the files - if necessary, run it on the files before they're transferred, and then again on the target machine where the problems are encountered. Copy/paste the result(s) here.


As a wild guess, I'm going to assume it's actually an issue with different versions of VLC, or that what you're seeing is one laptop using hardware acceleration through the Media Foundation (or maybe DirectShow) decoders in WMP, but *not* getting any hardware accel through libavcodec in VLC (which ties back into the version of VLC being used - newer versions are more likely to have hardware acceleration as an option; I can't say from my own experience whether VLC exposes libavcodec's hardware-accelerated decoders because I use mpv...and my computer is so ancient that not having hardware accel doesn't even rank on a list of things I have to worry about regarding video files).

 

[paul1149]

Perhaps bringing the settings from VLC/Win8 over to Win7 would do it. They're at %appdata%\vlc\vlcrc. Back up the existing settings first.

 

[C-Man]

If it randomly stops, that sounds like a hardware issue with the iPad. Have you tried transferring them over your network?