It’s Playing is a universal iPhone, iPod touch and iPad app that looks to fill the “I will play any video file type” space left when VLC was pulled from the App Store. It's Playing uses its own soon to be patented engine which it claims will play back most 720p content.

What differentiates It's playing, apart from pricing and the quality of the user interface, is the engine that takes advantage of the outstanding hardware and operating system it runs on.

AdditionFlow© is our optimized process for making sure that you get more video frames more synchronized with the audio, ensuring the best viewing experience.

• Play all video and audio formats commonly available on the web -- including AVI, RMVB, MKV and FLV (Flash Video)
• AdditionFlow© presentation engine: it plays most 720p hi-res video superbly — it's so great we're going to patent it.
• Image and sound precision controls
• File and folder management
• Improved privacy management
• Dynamic video quality monitoring and diagnostic

It's Playing is available as a universal binary for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch for $1.99.

[App Store link]

Have an app you’d love to see featured on TiPb? Email us at iosapps@tipb.com, tell us about your app (include an iTunes link), and we’ll take a look.

VLC developers Applidium have announced that they have submitted an update to the existing iPad app that will make it universal and support the iPhone and iPod Touch. The update to VLC, the media player all our otherwise unsupported video files love, and that came to the iPad about a month ago, is now headed to the iPhone and iPod touch is currently being reviewed by Apple, and we should expect it in the AppStore any time soon.

There are few restrictions with this new version:

• It’s still not possible to use the hardware video decoder, so unfortunately in most cases 720p video still won’t play smoothly.
• Unfortunately, we couldn’t support older iPhones and iPods. You’ll need either an iPhone 3GS or an iPhone 4 (or a same-generation iPod). The reason is actually pretty simple : based on our tests, the older iPhones (3G and Edge) don’t have enough power to properly decode most movies.

But along with the restrictions, there are some new features as well:

• Playback should be smoother than the previous version. Indeed, we’ve enabled low-level assembly optimisations to use the ARMv7 core of the Apple A4 processor as efficiently as possible.
• We’re supporting a lot more video extensions. Also, as many of you requested, it’s also now possible to open attachments from Mail or Safari (or any other applications actually) in VLC!
• This update is expected soon, and will be FREE for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

We've seen how it works now on iPad, so is who's excited to see it coming to iPhone?

[iTunes link, Applidium]

by George Lim

We didn't notice this until @pivale pointed us towards PCWorld's article, but sure enough according to Apple's iPad tech specs, the iPad does indeed support a type of .AVI video:

Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) up to 35 Mbps, 1280 by 720 pixels, 30 frames per second, audio in ulaw, PCM stereo audio in .avi file format

No .AVI support of any kind is listed under iPhone or iPod touch tech specs. (Then again, none of those devices are running iPhone 3.2 like the iPad -- yet).

.AVI, the audio-video interleave is a container introduced by Microsoft. Motion JPEG is a type of .AVI compression. While .AVI in general is ubiquitous for standard definition video content on the internet, there's no indication Apple is supporting the specific XviD codec (encoding/decoding) used by those files.

In other words, and as pointed out in comments below, this will help owners of some types of video cameras watch their footage via the camera card reader accessory, it won't let anyone watch their bootleg movies on the iPad.

VLC is a popular media player that supports countless audio and video codecs and multiple file formats. Because of such versatility, a lot of folks use VLC as their computer's main video player. And now thanks to ZodTTD, it's available for the iPhone (jailbroken ones only, sorry)!

The project is currently in private beta but a public release is planned for 'very soon'. In its current iteration, VLC supports drag and drop files for MPEG/MPG, AVI, and MP3 formats. Support for FLAC and OGG are well on their way and they are currently researching playback for DivX, VCD, WMA, and WMV. The project is even asking for YOUR input on what codecs you want to see supported, feel free to click the Read link to let your voice be heard.

I firmly believe that this will be a game changing program for the iPhone and the jailbreaking scene in general. Imagine being able to play ANY video format like the desktop version of VLC, that freedom from iTunes will undoubtedly lead people to jailbreaking. Keep up the good work ZodTTD!

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