Is there a good Windows Media Player app for the iPad?

There are no apps that allow you to actually play WMP content on your iPad.

RemoteX and similar apps allow you to take control of your Windows computer from your iPad from which you can then use the Windows system to play your content. If that would work for you, there are a number of remote control apps available. iTeleport is one that gets consistently good comments, though I haven't tried it myself. You'll need to see if any allow audio to be transferred; most do not, and I presume you'd want audio as well as video.

Regards.

There isn't a WMV player for the iPad. The remoteX player can only control the WMP on a computer/ laptop. It doesn't play WMV on the iPad.

To be honest I don't think you will ever see WMV on the iPad.

Here's the thing: a WMV player app would burn your battery like crazy.

Notice how you can have your iPad at 95% charge, play an hour of HD video, and when it's done, you're at 93% charge? That's because it uses hardware decoding for H264. Playing back video in software would suck up power and you probably wouldn't be happy.

So, while there's no technical reason someone couldn't do it, I agree, you probably won't see it.

freelancer™ wrote:
Notice how you can have your iPad at 95% charge, play an hour of HD video, and when it's done, you're at 93% charge?

Really?? If my iPad is at 95% charge and I do anything on it for an hour, it's at a lot less than 93%. Am I alone in this respect?

The iPad's battery is rated rated for 10 hours. That about 10% discharge per hour. I also do not understand the 2% usage for playing one hour of HD video. It just does not seem plausible.

lllaass wrote:
The iPad's battery is rated rated for 10 hours. That about 10% discharge per hour. I also do not understand the 2% usage for playing one hour of HD video. It just does not seem plausible.

I agree. How could you play an hour of video and only use 2% of the charge? Isn't video what chews up more battery charge than anything else? And the 10-hour rated battery is best case scenario, isn't it?

I thought maybe my iPad was defective. But now that I'm thinking about it, I think it would be defective if it only showed 2% battery drainage after an hour.

Message was edited by: jla930

Since there is no WMV player for the iPad it's pure speculation whether it would require more power to decode it compared to h264. The codec used in WMV is an open SMPTE standard and is used on bluray discs, it's not a proprietary format.

David_o99 wrote:
The codec used in WMV is an open SMPTE standard and is used on bluray discs, it's not a proprietary format.

There is no single codec used in WMV, so it's a bit simplistic to say that. The VC-1 codec was accepted as a standard, yes. But WMV videos may use other codecs, most of which are indeed proprietary to Microsoft. So while it's not impossible that Apple or someone else could implement a player that would handle VC-1 encoded material, such a player would not play probably the vast majority of current WMV content.

I did some more reading. It turns out the iPad does play the video codec used in WMV. WMV is using the VC1 encoding which is a standard and pretty efficient. It turns out Netflix is using that as their streaming codec. Now the Neflix streaming app for the iPad works great and the battery usage is very reasonable. I watched 5 hours of video on it and it drained the battery about 50%.

So, the iPad is perfectly capable of playing WMV (= VC1) and it's efficient at doing so. I bet the reason there is no general WMV video player for the iPad is more of a political thing between MS and Apple.

The iPad app is not using VC-1.
It is streaming H.264 video using HTML 5.
The website you access on the computer might well be using VC-1 since they use silverlight.

Reading a book in iBooks drains more battery for me than playing HD video. One hour-long episode of a TV show might suck up more than 2%, but not much more. Certainly not 10%.

Doing other stuff -- reading a book, browsing the web, even streaming video -- uses more battery than just playing back video that's stored on the device. Video playback of H.264 doesn't strain the thing at all.

The Netflix blog says they are encoding their movies using VC1. So you are saying they are converting on the fly to h264 just for the iPad? If yes where did you read this info? Just curious.