Anyone selling a first generation iPad?

Thursday, April 21st, 2011 at 12:12am

Right now I am only a fraction away from buying an iPad. However, not an iPad 2, but a first generation iPad for a much more reasonable price.

Why? Let me back up a bit…

After moving into my place I did briefly consider putting a television in the kitchen. This would be in addition to the one in the lounge and in addition to my computer. But I decided to be reasonable and I resisted the tempation. The logical place to put a tv would have required an extra power point, plus it would be another place to run a network cable to. So there is no television in the kitchen.

However something that became annoying was that I would be at my computer working on something with video playing in the corner of the screen when I needed to go cook dinner. So I would pause the video, go to the kitchen for 20/30 minutes and then resume the video.

This got me thinking. What if I had a tablet that I could take to the kitchen with me that continued to play the video. My first thought was something that I could redirect the video stream to, but then I started to think about mounting the tablet next to my monitor (freeing up some screen real estate) and playing the video on it all of the time.

This tablet didn’t need to be very fancy. It needed wireless ethernet for connectivity and in addition to playing video a web browser would be handy while watching the television in the lounge.

My first thought was the iPad, but I initially dismissed it because of its price and limited video format support. My second thought was an Android tablet which has better support for formats and playing directly off the network, but they are not as refined as the iPad, yet still as expensive.

Then the iPad 2 came out, so I could consider a first generation iPad to be within my price range and a little investigation found at least two options for streaming video from a server that transcoded it.

Using an iPad borrowed from work I first gave VLC streamer a try, but it was quite fiddly to use and the server component didn’t give feedback and control over how many videos were being transcoded. It was also annoying that it left transcoded chunks behind on disk.

I gave the iPad another try tonight, this time with Air Video which has proven to be a success over the past four hours with a variety of formats including a 1080 mkv. I quite like how it can detect a supported format, can perform live conversion, or can convert in the background. The full version of the app (which lets you see more than a couple of videos per folder) would be worth the couple of dollar purchase price.

So now I am on the hunt for an iPad. Either from someone I know who is upgrading to an iPad 2, or I will turn to eBay…

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