Audio issues with MKV file on iPad Air

[thekaty]

Hi folks,

I've got a brand new iPad Air and downloaded VLC, brought files over using both DropBox and the wireless uploader, and the audio won't work at all. Video's great, but no matter what settings I change, no sound. I deleted VLC and downloaded it again--same thing. The files I'm using are MKV and work great on my Mac's VLC, but not so much the iPad. I've looked through the forum to see if anything was already posted to solve this, but everything seems to have been taken care of in updates that I've already downloaded...help please? Maybe if I converted the file from MKV to something else? But I'm computer savvy up to using Pages and Microsoft Word, so I don't know how to do that. Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Are you in the USA?

[thekaty]

Yes.

[SabineH]

Hi,

I'm having the same problems. I'm from Germany. All my videos are great but audio won't work. No problems with audio on my computer.
Any suggestions or do I have to use another player, because I won't convert all these files into an mp4.
Thanks in advance

Sabine

[fkuehne]

Make sure that your iPad's time zone is set to Germany, too.

When opening said files on your computer, can you check the Information panel for the used audio codec?

[thekaty]

How do I check that? Sorry, like I said, pretty new at this.

[Flynne]

I'm having the same issues on my iPad 4. The picture looks great but there isn't a trace of sound. I'm also in the US. I think this is what you're looking for when I open it on the computer? If not.. let me know. This isn't really my thing.

[Venneh]

Same info on all fronts. Any idea what might be causing the issues? On the current version of VLC - 2.1.03.

EDIT: Same with .avi files.

[Venneh]

Okay, so after testing this today, the problem seems to be with .avi/.mkv files bigger than 1 gig.

[brnrw13]

I am having the same issue on my iPad mini. Even an MKV file that's only ~600MB isn't playing with any audio (not one of its multiple embedded audio streams are working).

[Yosemite1987]

I have the same audio issues on an iPad2 - no audio on .mkv or .avi files. A single sub-500mb .mp4 file played audio perfectly. All videos play the picture except I get a processor warning on 1080p files and the playback breaks up.

I haven't tried any other features since so far the player is a non-starter - but I'd like to use it since the WiFi upload feature is a nifty solution to Apple's closed garden (and I hate iTunes!). I'd like to be able to use my iPad2 instead of an Android tablet to watch my converted videos someday.

[Santana2]

I am originally from Switzerland and currently in the US for Vacation. I did copy some videos onto my iPad Air, tested them back at home, everything fine. Now in the US suddenly there is no audio.

However, changing the timezone of my iPad back to Swiss time resolved the issue and I am having audio like before.

[Flynne]

So after that last comment I figured I'd fiddle with the time zone settings (which just consisted of me picking random countries for the most part) and voila! Glorious sound, at last. Use your best guess to determine where the file came from and go from there, I guess. Bit annoying, but it works

[anjunatl]

Tried this and it worked, registered for the forum just to write this. I have an iPad mini and was trying to watch an 1.56GB h264 720p video with AC3 audio. Changing the timezone from EDT to Zurich/Switzerland worked for me. I tried Central, Mountain, and Pacific with no luck - then tried something ahead of EDT - Atlantic Daylight Time / Halifax, CA. That worked. Seems like audio works when the device's timezone is set to any timezone ahead of the user's timezone but not when it's set behind it. Bizarre.

Any idea why audio playback is related to timezones? Doesn't seem to be a DST issue as messages started in the winter.

Even more bizarre, I left the video running while I went to Settings to change my TZ back to EDT. Went back to VLC and the video continued to play with audio. Paused and resumed, now in my current timezone, and no audio.

[dfuhrmann]

Take a look at other threads here in the forum. There are already plenty indicating the reasons for that. Its not really our fault that audio does not work in certain configurations.