Thanks to its support of a single video format - MP4 - getting movies onto the iPad is, to be generous, a real pain. You can buy movies and TV shows from iTunes, but for most of the world that's not possible.

So most of us find alternative sources, and then convert these AVI, DIVX and MKV files to MP4. This takes forever and pretty much puts your computer out of action as it gets red-hot and churns through the queue. It also lowers quality.

What if there were a way to almost instantly convert these movies, without any loss in quality? It turns out there is. The software is called Avidemux 2, and it is free on OS X, BSD, Linux and Windows.

AVI, DIVX and many other formats are no more than wrappers for the actual video content inside. Think of them as a book cover with a table-of-contents to help you find your way around. The covers may vary, but the wad of pages inside is the same. With almost all downloaded video, that "wad of pages" turns out to be in the iOS-compatible H.264 codec. What Avidemux does, essentially, is to swap out the covers, and make sure the new table-of-contents points to the right pages. The video inside remains untouched.

Confused? Here's an example. I open up a video file in Avidemux. Let's use The Wire, season two, episode one, a 367.4 MB AVI file. It offers to "Rebuild Frames" for me, so I click yes. This takes less around ten seconds. In the drop-downs on the left, I pick the audio (AAC) and video (MP4) formats, leaving everything else alone. Then I hit save (Command-S on the Mac) and give the file a name along with the extension MP4. This needs to be done manually - the software doesn't name files automatically.

I click "Save" and this box pops up. Yes, that counter is accurate. Two minutes later I have a file that I can drop into iTunes and watch on my iPad. The video quality is unchanged from the original.

But that's not very elegant, right? Who wants a file called The.Wire.2x01.Ebb.Tide.MP4 sitting it their library, with no cover art, no plot synopsis and no polish? For this, you need something like iFlicks.

iFlicks will convert video, but its main purpose is adding metadata. It parses the file name and then searches the internet, grabs the data and adds it to the file. This can then be sent to iTunes. Here it is in action (I have my Mac set up to automatically launch iFlicks when a new movie hits a certain folder):

If you're lucky (ie. your file doesn't have some really weird naming convention) then the metadata will be just right, down to the video kind being correctly set (in this case, TV Show instead of Movie). Then you add to iTunes. In this case, the fastest way is to pick "Flatten to QuickTime Movie" from the top-left pop-up, which effectively just sinks the metadata into the file and then iFlicks can send the result to iTunes. Sync with the iPad and you're good to go.

Now, it is possible, apparently, to automate Avidemux to process a folder full of images instead of opening them by hand, one at a time. I couldn't make it work, but I am currently working on a combined shell-script and Automator workflow to take care of everything from download to conversion, triggered by an RSS feed. The instructions for batch processing can be found in this MacRumors forum post.

Worth a quick mention here is one even simpler way to play AVI files on the iPad. Amazingly, Apple approved an app called YXPlayer which supports DIVX/XVID. WMV, H.264, WMV and others. It costs $5 and would seem to be a perfect app other than that most of the reviews says it sucks, running at a a maximum of 15 frames per second for video and rendering audio sometimes unlistenable. It costs $5.

Avidemux doesn't work with every file, but it works with most, and is way faster and easier than the alternatives. Try it out. Avidemux 2 is free. IFlicks costs $23, with a free trial download, and runs on Mac OS X only.

Avidemux download [Avidemux.org]

iFlicks [iFlicksapp]