HOWTO : Convert your videos to play on your iPhone or iPod touch

[Stefan]

To use iVid to stream and play videos from your computer to your iPhone or iPod touch you first have to make sure that they are in a format that the iPhone or iPod touch can play. You also need to decide whether you want to watch these videos over WiFi or 3G/EDGE, and encode them appropriately. (Higher-quality videos that play and look great over WiFi simply won't stream fast enough to be watchable over 3G/EDGE.)

There are countless applications out there that will get the job done, so we'll list a couple that we've had success with and invite everyone to reply with their favorites as well.

1. QuickTime Pro [Mac+PC] - $29.99 - http://www.apple.com/quicktime/pro/

Apple's solution is by far one of the easiest, but you have to have paid for the "Pro" upgrade to unlock the conversion functionality in QuickTime. To convert, simply:

1. Open the video file you want to convert in QuickTime Pro.
2. Choose "Export" from the "File" menu.
3. Choose "Movie to iPhone" for a WiFi quality *.m4v file or "Movie to iPhone (Cellular)" for an 3G/EDGE quality *.3gp file from the "Export" drop-down list and click the "Save" button.

2. HandBrake [Mac+PC] - Free - http://handbrake.fr/

HandBrake is a very popular, open-source video converter. To convert, simply:

1. Open the video file you want to convert in HandBrake.
2. In the "Presets" panel choose "Apple > iPhone & iPod touch" and then click the "Start" button to create a WiFi quality *.mp4 video file.

If you are looking to make a 3G/EDGE quality *.mp4 video file, you will need to make the following changes to the preset first:

Video
- Framerate (FPS) : 15
- Quality : Average bitrate (kbps) of 48
- Picture Settings : Resize the video to be 176 pixels wide, keeping the aspect ratio.

Audio
- Mono (if available) at the lowest Samplerate (kHz) of 22.05  and Bitrate (kbps) of 32

[kasaialma]

Hi,

I'm actually trying to convert my video files to a format that is good for 3 uses at the same time (iphone, internet streaming, and on the television). I'm trying not to duplicate (don't want same show in multiple formats - storage issues). Is there a format that is compatible with the iphone, but still looks good on a television screen?

Nathan

[Stefan]

kasaialma - I suppose it depends what you feel looks good on your television screen, how big your TV is, if it is HD, etc.

When I purchased some TV episodes from iTunes a few months ago, the videos were 640x360. The files are compatible with both the iPhone and Apple TV, and they looked good on both. The problem that I had was that they were bigger than they needed to be for my iPhone, so syncing them took up more space than they needed to. (The iPhone's screen resolution is 480x320, yet it can play videos that are up to 640x480.)

If you encode videos specifically for the iPhone, a widescreen video will be resized down to 480x270, which does look fuzzier on a big HD TV than the 640x360. It doesn't look horrible, but it definitely doesn't look as crisp.

The thought then may be to encode everything at 640x360, but you just have to make sure that your upload bandwidth will support the consequent bitrate required. The iTunes-purchased files had bitrates at around 1500-1600 kbits/s, which equates to around 200 KB/s of upload bandwidth. The 480x270 ones, however, are more in the neighborhood of 900 kbits/s, or 112 KB/s.

My cable modem at home says it has a theoretical upload limit of 1725 kbits/s, so encoding everything at 640x360 might be pushing it when I am on a different WiFi network. Streaming them from the same network should be no problem.

(If you are wanting to also watch these videos over 3G, then there really is no format that will look good on all formats, as the 3G streaming is limited to around 80 kbits/s or 10 KB/s.)

[midvid]

I use "PQ DVD to iPod Video Suite", set at highest quality. I rip everything at 640x480 as they display quite well on my 42" 1080P set, and they still play well loaded on the iPod (and I don't load many on there anyway so the extra file size is a non-issue). Casablanca, for example, is 1.09 GB.

This application is really great, enabling me to use my iPod as a wireless video streaming device. I have dozens of videos readily available to watch.

[Stefan]

Thank you for that!

[wangcuigui]

ipod video converter can convert videos to your ipod or ipod touch. It can convert avi, flv, mpg, mpeg, wmv, etc to ipod and then you can play them.
http://www.iphone-videoconverter.com/index.html

[sumudra uk]

HandBrake is very good software to covert, better try this

[caribbean pirate]

This video converter which is named as iPod touch converter is specially designed for conversion about iPod touch from other video and audio foramts. For its professional design, it can help you great with fast running speed and video and audio and pic quality keeping. Only several dollars can confer you the right to perform most of the iPod touch conversion with the supporting formats like MPG, MPEG, MPEG2, SWF, FLV, VOB, MOD, MP4, H.264, M4V, AVI, WMV, 3GP, 3GPP, MOV, DivX, XviD, QuickTime Video, DV, MJPG, MJPEG, MPV, etc.


Blu Ray Burner, a professional blue ray burning software, can help you burn Blu-ray Discs (BD) and DVD (AVCHD) so that you can play them on Blu-ray players (including Sony PlayStation 3).

With this Blu Ray Disk Burner, you can convert almost all popular video formats to Blu Ray DVD disc such as WMV, MKV, AVI, DivX, XviD, MPEG, MP4, QuickTime Movie (MOV, QT), Real Video (RM, RMVB), H.264/AVC, M2TS, FLV, etc, which can be coded to the high definition videos.

The Blu Ray Burner supports burning on discs like DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RW, BD-R, BD-RE, etc. So many powerful functions are just for you to make your own blue ray DVD movie. Free download and try it.

[oposky2006]

Why shall we choose Pavtube Video Converter?
The following details attracted us:
Enjoy videos like TiVo, M2TS, MOD, VOB, AVI, WMV, MKV, Flash videos etc everywhere with portable devices like iPad, iPod, iPhone, Blackberry etc.
Faster conversion speed, saving you at least half time to convert a same file.
Better output video quality without any audio and video sync issues.

[capricornJZ]

I have never seen such powerful video converting software like LeKuSoft Video Converter before. It is not only a video converting program but also audio converting and video editing application. It supports various HD video formats like HD AVI, HD MPEG-4, HD MOV, HD WMV, etc and different SD video  formats, such as ASF, AVI, MPEG, MKV, WMV, 3GP, FLV, etc.

 

  A special point of LeKuSoft Video Converter is that it can extract soundtrack from the video and save it in different formats like AAC, AC3, MP3, OGG, RA, WAV, WMA, etc.

  Supporting large numbers of video and audio formats is not LeKuSoft Video Converter’s only feature. It also provides many practical functions like preview the video before conversion to check the correctness, clip video  into several segments or clip your favorite segment and convert it only, take  snapshots during the preview for collection, convert in batch no matter how many videos there are how what the formats are, etc.

 

  LeKuSoft Video Converter is really a powerful and practical multimedia tool. The advantages of it cannot be fully expressed here and if you want to get more information about it, you can download it and have a try.