iPad Camera Connection Kit

Today I have been playing around with the iPad camera connection kit to see how it would work with photos and movies. After seeing quite a bit on the Internet I wanted to find out exactly what was true and so I set to work to find out.
First can you access a USB drive with the camera kit, answer yes.
You have to do 2 things to get this to work.
First format the USB key as fat.
Second place a single folder DCIM on the drive, then all you need to do is place your photos in this folder and when you plug it into the iPad it will automatically open the photo console. From here you can upload you photos to the iPad for viewing. Using this method you can delete the photos when you are done and reload them if required.

Next can you load movies from a USB key, answer yes.
To do this you need to format you videos to iPad format, I found a free conversion program, Videora which will convert you videos to mp4 format, a 200meg file took 5 min to convert and maintained the same quality as the original avi file. Once you have your converted file you have to rename it to have 8 character name and a m4v extension, eg 12345678.m4v if your file name is not 8 characters or it is not a m4v it will not work. Then load this file into the DCIM folder on the key and when you plug it into the iPad the photo viewer will open and allow you to upload the video. From here it is simply a mater of hitting play and then when you no longer need it just delete.
If you want to add subfolders under the DCIM folder you can do that and the videos will still show up.
All in all a nice way to keep you iPad hard drive free from un needed large video and picture files.