I got my camera connection kit today and was extremely eager to find out what I could do with it with a jailbroken iPad, the results are extremely pleasing.

Basically, I've determined that iFile will read the card just as if it were part of the internal file system so everything you can do with iFile on normal files still applies. That means image and video playback straight from the SD card without having to transfer first!

I was also interested in finding out what class of SD would be required to play video straight from the card. I have determined that measley class 2 cards are absolutely fine for this task. I had bought a more expensive Class 6 32GB card - this obviously had no problems with video but the same tests on an old 2GB class 2 card also went fine.

For test clips, I was re-encoding a 2 minute chunk of Avatar at 1024x576. I chose this resolution as it matches the iPad screen resolution so no up or down scaling is done. I endcoded at AVC Level 3.1 (max bitrate 14,000kbps) at various average bitrates. The Class 6 and Class 2 cards were both doing fine up to 8.5mbps average at which point I stopped testing as this bitrate is definitely overkill for the iPad display size and the picture looked amazing.

So in summary, if you're jailbroken (and there really is no reason at all why you shouldn't be) and you were wondering if the camera kit could solve your iPad storage issues - it can. I now only have to take a few tiny SD cards on holiday with me and I will have 32+32+8 (sd cards) + 16 (iPad) = 88gb of storage for movies/tv episodes in mp4 format.

To get ifile to read your sd/USB devices simply connect them to the ipad, wait for the error message and ok it. Launch ifile and browse to /var/mnt/mount1 and you will then be looking at the contents of your sd/USB device.

Very cool...thanks

Except...what file formats is iFile playing for you?

I'm converting everything to .mp4. For tv episodes I've found you can leave the x264 video as is and just re-encode the audio to aac (quite a quick job with avidemux).

For movies or an episode that needs a complete re-encode, I'm using tmpgenc xpress 4.0 set to 1000kbps average video (14,000 max) and 160kbps cbr aac (low complexity).

The full list of formats supported by iFile are:
mov, mp4, mpv, m4v, 3gp

I don't think that any special work was required on iFile to allow browsing of the sd cards so when vlc4ipad comes out, there'll no doubt be even more formats we can play.

Awesome, thanks now I will jailbreak my ipad

Oh I see what you're saying...you're just storing it all on the SD card of the camera....

Additional: in the iFile preferences, set the default directory to var/mnt/mount1 to save having to browse there or use a bookmark.

For my sun breaks in Cyprus, I already have Archer, Caprica and Leverage encoded to mp4 and on the sd card. Just need to choose a few more series to encode and I'm set. I certainly hope the battery lives up to expectations, apart from short tests, I've not tried prolonged video playback on my iPad yet.

Originally Posted by Matth3w

Oh I see what you're saying...you're just storing it all on the SD card of the camera....

Yes, in fact I don't even have a camera that takes SD, I bought the kit purely to allow additional storage for video on my iPad.

This is awesome news thanks for sharing, now I just need apple to get some in stock, still 4 to 6 week's shipping

i hv been playing with few SD cards and Flash drive even up to those 126 GB flash drive, only a few brand of SD or flashdrive it can be use on ipad. Like my Kingston class 4, 8 GB one works fine too. video can be play on the SD card itself without been transfer into ipad. But my Sandisk class 6 , 8 GB SD card can't work at all. So it's brand driven, not class driven.

may i know what is the brand of your 32 gb sd card?