I found a working solution, which is not completely, what I asked for.
One problem is that the iPad (or any IOS) does not leave anything open for ad-hoc wifi connections.
What you need is an app. Since you do not want a generic open back door to your device, most of the app only work when they are directly activated. And many of them have a not-so-agile web interface for uploading.
What I did find was an excellent movie player called OPlayer Lite which is free (by showing adds). It has a feature that allows you to upload movies through wifi, with either http or ftp. So since I cannot get the fully automated way, this way seems best.
Next problem was that apperently all movie players on IOS will not play DTS sound due to a licensing issue. This means that all the high quality MKV movies you got only display the image.
What you need is MP4 - an optimal format for movies on the iPad.
To get from MKV to MP4 you need a converter. If you do some googling you will probably come by Handbrake. An excellent, lightweight, but very neerdy converter. They try to make it easy, but there is just too many settings :)
What a did was I made a powershell script that could take all the mkv movies in a specified source folder (subfolders not supported) and convert that into iPad optimized MP4 movies. Ready to be copied to the iPad. Since the convertion proces takes a while, I made a scheduled task that converts all new movies every night.
$destinationFolder = 'C:\My-Mp4-Movies\';
$sourceFiles = Get-ChildItem -Path C:\My-MKV-Movies -Filter *.mkv
foreach ($source in $sourceFiles)
{
$filename = $source.Name.Substring(0,$source.Name.Length-4);
$destination = $destinationFolder + $filename + '.mp4';
if(Test-Path -Path $destination) { continue };
$handbrake = "C:\Program Files\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe";
$arguments = "-i " + $source.FullName, "-o " + $destination, " --preset=""iPad""";
Start-Process -FilePath $handbrake -ArgumentList $arguments -NoNewWindow -Wait
}
Please note that the above script use a Handbrake preset called iPad. I am sure expert Handbrake users can come up with a better way to convert your high quality movies.
So in the end to get a new movie to the iPad you need to perform the following 3 simple steps
- Run the Powershell script to convert the movie
- Open the OPlayer Lite app and click the wifi button the lower left corner
- Copy the movies to the iPad using FTP or HTTP (I prefer FTP which you can make a powershell script for as well)
I hope you can use the above to enhance your iPad Movie experience :)