— The iPad is great for watching movies, but there's only so much you can fit on one device—especially if you have one of the smaller versions. Luckily, you can actually use external storage with the iPad. Here's how.
Mac OS X Hints reader Nigel discovered that Apple's iPad Camera Connection Kit makes a great external storage device. It's designed to take photos from your camera's SD card and import them into your iPad, and with a little clever file naming, you can throw some movies on your SD cards and use it as extra iPad storage for those really long plane rides.
Because its only designed to import photos and video from a camera, you need to trick it into thinking your ripped movies are actually videos taken by your camera. The best way to get it set up is use it in one of your cameras first. Then, you just put your files in the folder created by your camera (for example, /DCIM/100DICAM), and rename them to fit the 8-digit filename structure your camera uses to store photos and videos (like DCM_0001, DCM_0002, etc.). When you plug it into the iPad via the camera connection adapter, you should be able to import videos right into the photos app.
Of course, you won't be able to import them all—if we could do that, we wouldn't need this trick. But you can delete videos from your iPad, import a video or two from the SD card, and then delete them after you've watched them to make room for more. It just adds a bit more to the space you can carry around with you, which is really nice.
Sadly, my Camera Connection Kit is from the old days of the iPod and won't work with the iPad, so I haven't tested this myself, but if you get a chance, give it a try and let us know how it works in the comments.