Reasons to Upgrade From iPad 1 to iPad 2 - Video

There are many who told me that there are no reasons enough to upgrade my iPad 1 to iPad 2.
They feel that without a Retina Diaplay, the rest are too trivial.

I beg to differ and went on to sell off my iPad 1 and get the second gen. No regret since.
First off, video watching is one of my main uses of iPad.
The current iOS, as with the previous versions only support hardware video acceleration for mp4 format. In fact the built in Video app only support mp4 format.

Not long ago, Apple open up its app store to third party video player apps. These apps support video formats other than mp4, e.g mkv, avi, rmvb, etc. However it can only use software decoders to decode these formats. When these formats are played on my previous iPad 1, higher bit-rate videos tend to go sluggish intermittently.



I ran the same bit-rate video of avi format on my iPad 2 and hey, it plays rather smoothly!

Watch this space for more reasons to upgrade ....