Movies on the iPad are great, but watching them on a bigger screen is often even more gratifying—especially if everyone in the house wants to watch. You can put all those movies and videos up on your TV screen—you just need to connect your iPad to your television set. What you connect them with depends on the hardware you have.

First of all, if you have a second-generation Apple TV (the little black square one), you can use its built-in AirPlay wireless capability to grab video you stream from your iPad and display it on the big screen at up to 1080p resolution, the best there is, depending on the video’s (and your TV’s) native resolution. Stream and Mirror Files With AirPlay has the details on that. (In fact, with an iPad 2 and iOS 5, you can mirror anything on your screen, including video games, on an HDTV, as Stream and Mirror Files With AirPlay shows.)