iTunes Needed as Middle Man

When you launch the program, it immediately tells you to hook up the iPad to a computer in order to access iTunes. That’s because files can’t be downloaded into the program directly. They first have to travel through iTunes.

Once iTunes and the iPad are talking to each other, you access your iPad. You do that by clicking on the iPad icon in the Devices section in the navigation pane on the left side of the screen.

That will display a window into your iPad to the right of the navigation pane. At the top of that window are menu items. You can see all the books on your iPad, for instance, or all your TV shows.

There’s also an item for Apps. When you click that, icons for all your iPad apps will appear. If you scroll below the apps section, you’ll see a File Sharing area.

That area lists all the programs on the iPad that can share files with the computer iTunes is running on. VLC will be listed there.

Your iPad’s Too Slow

When you click on VLC, a directory tree will appear in a pane beside the apps list. Transferring files into VLC is as simple as selecting a file on the tree and clicking choose.

I transferred a couple of files to VLC on my iPad. One was a QuickTime file (MOV) and the other a TV episode in HD video purchased from the iTunes store.

After the transfer, I opened up VLC on my iPad. The two files were there, sitting on a shelf a la iBooks, with the animated “working” symbol circling, circling, circling in the blank gray tiles representing the files. The symbol never stops circling.

I poked the TV episode in 1280 x 720 HD. Up popped a warning: “Your iPad is probably too slow to play this movie correctly.” Along with the warning, I had two choices “Cancel” and “Try anyway.” A gambler by nature, I tapped “Try anyway.” All that appeared was a blank, black screen.

I had better success with my QuickTime movie, which was in 720 x 540 HD. It displayed adequately, but the motion was choppy and the app stopped running abruptly in the middle of it.

No doubt iPad jocks with a yen to play a variety of video formats unsupported by Apple on their iPad will find VLC a useful toy for that purpose. Most users, though, will find that they can live perfectly well without the software.