Best Video Players for iPad - Top Free iPad Video Players Review

The default video player on the iPad is good but it's not as powerful as you want it to be. A long time ago, Apple made it difficult for third-party developers to make a good media player for the iPad. Thankfully, over the years they've loosened their restrictions, there are a ton of video player apps on the App Store designed for the iPad. The following article has picked 5 best free video player applications for your iPad/iPad Air/iPad Mini/iPad Pro, etc. Each iPad video player has its own set of pros and cons, you can make a good judgement and decision based on our review.

Top Best Free Video Players for iPad

#1. PlayerXtreme (Free: $4.99 for Pro features)

When it comes to watching movies or playing music on your iPad, you need some extraordinary media players to deliver the best! And PlayerXtreme seems to be the one. Whether the file is in MKV format or MP4, it plays all the videos and music files on your iPad or iPhone. Most interestingly, the latest version of the app supports the streaming for files larger than 4GB too. It plays the files from your emails too.

Where it falls short

PlayerXtreme's in-app purchase model can be a bit confusing, and honestly most of its best features are locked behind the paywall, so you should expect to shell out the $5 for it.

#2. VLC (free)

VLC plays a ton of video formats, syncs with the most popular cloud storage apps, and has excellent support for subtitles. VLC is also pretty outdated at this point, as its pushing almost a year since the app was updated. Still though, VLC is free, and if you can get past the quirks, it does its job well.

Where it falls short

VLC isn't perfect though, it tends to be a bit buggy for some people and the general app design is unintuitive.

#3. nPlayer ($8.99 on App Store)

It's a very functional iPad movie player. nPlayer supports all the most popular 1080p formats, AC3 sound, multi touch gestures and a detailed subtitles setup. Someone who likes to watch movies with original audio, may like this setup and quite a big list of the formats supported by the app - SMI, SSA, SRT, LRC, SUB, SubStation Alpha. You can customize the text of subtitles by choosing size, color, position of the letters. Moreover, this iPad video player can display two subtitle frames at a time (using different languages), yet this may not be too comfortable on iPad.

Where it falls short

nPlayer is available now in the App Store for $8.99, but the price is well worth it when you consider all it can do and what most other media devices cost to do the same.

#4. KMPlayer (free)

KMPlayer plays a variety of files and formats. And just like VLC and the free version of Infuse, KMPlayer lacks support for some of the licensed formats including Dolby AC3 and DTS audio codecs, and DivX video. Fortunately newer codecs including H.265 are supported. KMPlayer provides the usual options for importing media: Wi-Fi drag and drop, FTP server support, and compatibility with cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox. There's support for gestures, the ability to organize files using the media library, and no intrusive adverts or in-app purchases.

Where it falls short

Unfortunately KMPlayer doesn't support quite as many formats as VLC, nor does it provide much in the way of additional features or support. It's still an option though.

#5. Kodi (free)

Formerly known as XBMC, Kodi is probably the best media center you can get. It's free, open source, compatible with a wide range of codecs and formats, but there's one catch: Kodi isn't available in the App Store. If you want to run Kodi on your iPhone or iPad, you'll either need to jailbreak it, or compile it yourself using Xcode. The best thing about Kodi is the version parity shared between all compatible platforms. Every device can enjoy the same compatibility, hardware limitations notwithstanding. You can't necessarily record cable TV through your iPad because there's no way to connect the cable, for example.

Where it falls short

Compiling and installing of Kodi can be a hassle especially for beginners.

Third-party iPad Video Players VS Native iPad Video Player

Although those third-party video players can help users to largely extend the media playback capability of iPad, however, a lot of people may be still in favor of watching video or listening to music with the native video player offered by iPad for the following 2 reasons:
- The native video player is able to use your iPad battery more efficiently, so that your iPad can work longer with it than with any other apps.
- A third-party app may not provide the optimal performance and experience that's offered by a native video player app.

Best iPad native video player assistant

For those people who assist on to play video or music with the native video player offered by iPad, you can easily fix the limited format playback capability of native video player by downloading this best iPad Video Player assistant - Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac. The program has full support for various media types including commercial Blu-ray/DVD disc and also 4K/2K/HD/SD digital video in virtually any file formats. Thanks to its batch conversion mode, you can easily load multiple digital video into the application for conversion at one time.

This powerful yet simple to use application can assist you to comprehensively produce iPad supported file formats (including all currently available iPad models such as iPad/iPad Air 2/iPad Mini 4/iPad Pro/iPad (2017) native video player supported video and audio file formats. In addition, you can also flexibly adjust output profile parameters such as video codec, bit rate, frame rate, resolution, audio codec, bit rate, sample rate, channels, etc to get the best output video and audio quality for iPad.

Tips: Although some iPad models can playback 4K resolution video, however, hardly any of them own a 4K display screen, to get the optimal playback experience, it would be much ideal for you to compress 4K to 1080p.

Pavtube iMedia Converter for Mac is available to download on macOS High Sierra, macOS Sierra, Mac OS X El Capitan, Mac OS X Yosemite, Mac OS X Mavericks, etc. For your great convenience, it is also has a Windows version - Pavtube Video Converter Ultimate on Windows 10/8.1/8/7.

What's Next? Price: $65