Best way to get video onto an iPad?

Googling this is largely useless since it's filled with questionable software that's been SEO'ed to hell.

Is Handbrake still the best approach in terms of speed and ease of use (quality is less important)? I'm looking for something grandma-proof that effortlessly converts into a format that's easy to import into iTunes.

I'd prefer an offline copy, so I guess Air Video is out?

 

Handbrake has an ipad preset. It's probably among the best in terms of quality or speed (but not both) and fitting your usage pattern (since your required behavior is maintaining an itunes synced copy). Handbrake can take a very long time to encode video in great quality, or it can encode quickly and produce a tolerable result that isn't amazing.

I'm imagining a solution that involves a 3rd party app on the app store, leaving your computer running, and using it as a streaming server to the iPad to avoid needing to sync.

 

i prefer to watch online.. else, there is a program to put video into itunes. Cant recall the name, i think there are few anyway.

 

You can use VLC but files won't sync with your itunes library.

 

If you don't care about file sizes, I use AVPlayerHD (look for it on the App Store). It plays pretty much every file I throw at it pretty well, even 720p MKV files. It struggles a bit with 1080p MKV though. There's no need to do any kind of converting or anything, just the same file you downloaded on your PC will work directly on the iPad.

You can transfer files to the program using a couple of ways:

1. The app has a Wi-Fi transfer method, where once you're in the app, it will broadcast a FTP server that you can connect to from any other computer on the safe Wi-Fi network (i.e. home) and transfer files using a fairly simple to use web page uploader.

2. Using iTunes, go to the Apps tab and transfer a file into the app.