We are very happy to line up one of our new guestbloggers on Knightwise.com. Its @McVries_ who kicks of the series with a great article on “sliding” from Ubuntu to IOS and hooking up your iPad .. without iTunes .. on a Linux machine.
Ubuntu 12.04 : Mount that iPad : Play .Avi : No iTunes 🙂Â
iTunes has some disadvantages, and one of them is a rather serious one for any linux user. It just isn’t available. Although some older versions are said to be Wine compatible I have a Windows virtual machine setup to be able to use iTunes (amongst other tasks). But since spotify I don’t sync that much music anymore and for my daily dose of podcasts I’ve dumped iTunes a long time ago. But what about movies? Well, i recently figured out that it’s a lot easier for an Ubuntu user to transfer them to an iPad then for, let’s say, a Mac or Windows user. How? Directly from the Desktop! And in a lot of cases you don’t even need to bother to convert it to a native iOs format. Een .avi or a .mkv plays very well.
The Recipe: An iOs device, in my case an iPad, one USB cable, your computer running Ubuntu and (for example) OPlayerHD Lite (Free as in beer in the appstore).
After connecting your iOs device you will see two mountpoints pop up in your filebrowser. One of them facilitates your photo import and the other one with a name like “Documents from {Username}” is the one we want now. This is the one that will help you ‘inject’ a file in almost any off the applications you have installed on your device. If you open it you’ll see something like this:
And OPlayer is in there as well. (Why do i use OPlayer? It supports .avi, mkv, and dvd-folders, locally and over the network). Double click it’s icon and finally you’ll find a folder called Documents and a folder “Inbox” within. Now just paste the movie you want to watch and watch it dive into your iPad at an enjoyable speed. Start the applicationon on the iPad, browse to the My Documents folder and Enjoy. Offline!
Some caveats: Copying a 8 GB Matroska (.mkv) would prove to be rather pointless, the iPad isn’t hefty enough i found. Take a more modest one, around 2 GB for 90 minutes and it seems to work well. Avi is no problem at all.
Links : oPlayerHDlite
A post by Guestblogger McVries  http://www.mcvries.nl A blog about my experiences using an opensource OS while working as a Windows sysadmin, and being the techno advocate for the organization i work for.
@McVries_Â Â Skeptic IT Manager with a liking for open Source.