The VideoLAN Forums

Can VLC play videos directly from an SD Card or USB adapter? Apple's own or 3rd party ones?

Reason being, I'm going on holiday and I want to take a bunch of films to watch on the plane. Unfortunately, my iPad is only a 16 gig version, so I don't have any room on it for films. I need to have them on some wired storage device. Nothing that requires wifi.

Suggestions?

Regrettably, there is no API to read arbitrary files from SD cards, so we can't support that :/

Oh. <sigh> Serves me right for getting an iPad rather than an Android or Windows tablet. :-/

Okay, so you can't play video directly from external storage, but is there any way to transfer a video file into VLC without having to go via a PC/Mac?

VLC has a built in http server that allows you tu upload movies on your iPad's internal storage via wi-fi quite simply by dragging/dropping files in your browser but that could imply the usage of a Mac/Pc.
Solution : buy a wi-fi hdd/ssd or a wi-fi module that is able to host sd-card/usb pen (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ICEWB58) to play movies directly from this external storage via wi-fi

Thanks, but not really suitable for the circumstance. Can't use wifi on the plane. It has to be a wired interface. So frustrating that there doesn't seem to be a solution to what sounds like a very simple problem.

You can if you are jailbroken by mounting the sd card (has to be hfs+ format) and then use sftp to access the contents (with OpenSSH installed and a port higher than 50000).

Browsing might be an issue though. It's not the best solution as its very hacky, but it's something.

In response to McDark's comment "Can't use wifi on the plane"....Not sure about that!

American Airlines
https://www.americanairlines.com.au/i18 ... nology.jsp

QANTAS
http://www.qantas.com/travel/airlines/w ... ment/au/en

4 handy options for adding storage to your iPhone or iPad
http://www.macworld.com/article/2904073 ... -ipad.html