OPlayer HD review

Despite being the best movie player you can sling into your bag for a long journey, the iPad has a couple of problems. Its built-in video player only supports its own formats, usually demanding that you put other files through a long, tedious conversion process, and having to sync your files is nothing short of a pain.

OPlayer HD solves both in one go. You can, of course, synchronise files in iTunes the old fashioned way, but you can also do it wirelessly by entering the IP address in your browser and uploading videos to the iPad. It's not fast, but it doesn't involve plugging it in.

You can also access files via FTP, on your PC or otherwise, or through SAMBA. Once the videos are on your iPad, you can use OPlayer to assemble them into playlists or fire them up individually.

The only weakness is that, because it's not using hardware decoding, you can't play high-definition movies as well as the dedicated video client. There are options to skip frames and filter the stream, and in most cases this wasn't a problem for us, but it's an unfortunate limitation.

We tested it out on a long flight, where we easily got the iPad's promised 10 hours of battery life out of our video collection and made the passengers on either side of us incredibly jealous as they squinted at their in-flight entertainment.

With OPlayer HD installed for watching content on the go, and another app such as AirVideo on hand for streaming videos directly from your home network, you'll never find yourself stuck without something to watch again.

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