Guys, during testing, I needed to be able to transfer my high-bitrate / framerate videos to the stock Videos app so that I can drive the HDMI adapter at 1080p. During this, I've made some discoveries. As this might prove useful for all of you (for generic high-bitrate / framerate video importing to iDevices - but can be used for plain video transfer too), I'm posting my tutorial directly here.
Tutorial: This is How You Can Put Videos on Your iDevice Without iTunes
SUMMARY: In the article below, I explain how one can transfer videos to the stock Videos application on any iDevice with a brand new version of the excellent, free, all-in-one iDevice transfer tool iFunBox. Uploading videos to the Videos app, so far, has only been possible via the Movies tab in iTunes. iTunes, however, had several restrictions and, in many cases, makes it entirely impossible to transfer several kinds of videos to the iDevice.
THE MAIN ARTICLE:
iTunes, Apple's only desktop tool to transfer videos / movies to the stock
Videos app delivered on all iDevices by default, has several restrictions and problems:
- transferring any(!) videos from more than one desktop computer is problematic if not downright impossible. You can't just give your iDevice to your friend to quickly copy a video / movie to it so that you can watch it in the Videos app: he most likely won't have an iTunes synchronized with your iDevice. Sure, he can copy from non-synchronized iTunes too to third-party video player applications via iTunes File Sharing (which doesn't require any kind of synchronization partnership) or via the (at least an order of magnitude slower) built-in Web / FTP server of those third-party apps (if supported - recommended players like AVPlayer(HD) or GoodPlayer almost all have such servers). However, this can only be done with third-party apps and not the stock Videos app: to the latter, it's simply not possible to copy anything with Apple's own tools. All he can do is creating a new synchronization partnership to your device, which, on the other hand, would most likely wipe out all the existing videos you may already have synchronized to your iDevice.
- iTunes doesn't let for synchronizing high-framerate videos to the device - and there are plenty of them, particularly now with consumer cameras recording into 50p / 60p formats getting very common. (And several Blu-ray / DVD discs you can purchase in stores / off the Web also have 60p content; for example, volume 3 of the MindCandy demo series (Vol1 and 2 are 29.97fps)). iDevices could play them back just fine even 50 Mbps(!) 1080p60 videos can be played back on anything A5(X) or A6(X)-based without stuttering. (50 Mbps is almost the double of the bitrate (28 Mbps) consumer cameras use for 1080p60 recording.) Nevertheless, Apple doesn't offer any way of synchronizing these videos to your iDevice. Sure, you can use a third-party player (preferably with hardware decoding support) and transfer the files viathe standard iTunes File Sharing. However, for example HDMI / VGA out may be restricted in these cases to a somewhat less-than-ideal (900p) resolution.
- iTunes doesn't let for synchronizing anything with more than 4.1 of the so-called H.264 level. While it's pretty much understandable they've chosen 4.1 as the upper, hard-coded limit not to have to allow users synchronize anything on iDevices that could stutter during playback, this restriction also made it impossible to synchronize perfectly playable videos. Or, for that matter, ones that have too high a H.264 level by mistake for example, the vast majority of the 1080p-capable Canon cameras belong to this category. (They, absolutely unnecessarily, use H.264 level 5.0 even for 1080p24 footage, which is certainly an overkill even 4.1 would be an overkill. This means those videos just can't be directly synchronized to the stock Videos app via iTunes without manually editing / changing the H.264 level first. If it works at all Canon 1080p24 videos are well-known for very problematic H.264 level editing compliance.)
Unfortunately, for some videos, none of the above-listed methods work. For example, regarding high-framerate videos, my open-source Camera Roll importer utility (
link) can only import 720p60 videos up to around 15-20 Mbps; for videos with 30 (or more) Mbps, it won't work. Neither will it work for any 1080p60 video. In addition,
FreeSync (and other utilities) have never worked under iOS 5 or 6 and the, latest version (currently, 3.2.1.3 for OS X) of the otherwise, excellent
iExplorer can't do desktop-to-device transfers either, only in the opposite direction.
iFunBox for the rescue! The recently-released, new preview of the Windows version of this free(!) app does what we need: to import any(!) kind of videos even ones with extremely high (for example, 100 Mbps) video bitrates.
Using iFunBox for video import
(Note that this tutorial only explains video transferring to the iDevice. iFunBox has a lot of other functionalities as well.)
Get the (currently) 2.5 preview (
direct EXE installer link; linked from
THIS Version History page) from the homepage of iFunBox. Don't bother with the Mac version: as of now (version 1.1), it doesn't support video importing at all. Don't even try.
Install it (will work just fine in the 64-bit version of Windows 8 too). If you haven't installed iTunes on the given desktop (including virtual machines on, say, a Mac running Parallels), also install iTunes. It doesn't need to be in any kind of a synchronization relationship with the iDevice you want to access from iFunBox. For example, I use OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) on my 17 MBP most of the time. However, to run Windows apps (not compatible with the lightweight
CrossOver), I'm using
Parallels 8. As I sync my iDevices from under OS X, I couldn't synchronize them from under Windows the operating system I need to run iFunBox on. Nevertheless, this isn't a problem as, as has already been explained, all you need to do to let iFunBox access the iDevice is install iTunes on the same desktop and nothing else.
After installing iFunBox, start it and let it recognize your iDevice: the area annotated with a red rectangle below should show your iDevice's name:
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(as always, click for the original-sized, high-quality screenshot)
Now, click the
Quick Toolbox icon at the top (annotated by a green rectangle above) and, then, select
iPod video (annotated with blue above) in the
Import files and data group.
Then, just drag-and-drop the videos you'll want to transfer onto the new dialog that is displayed (annotated with a purple rectangle). After starting the import process, when the progress bar reaches 100%, you can safely close it with the X icon in the upper left, annotated with a red rectangle below:
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Quick tips
Video files transferred this way won't be manually deletable from, say, the iTunes instance you use for (officially) synchronizing video files to the stock Videos app on the iDevice. (A side note: you don't need to have any kind of video synchronization relationship for iFunBox's video transfer to work.) Left-swipes etc. won't work either in the Videos filelist. The easiest way of (mass-)getting rid of your transferred files is just disabling synching in iTunes (removing the checkmark from the
Synch Movies checkbox), it'll delete the otherwise non-deletable ones.
The Videos app won't generate thumbnails for the list view. An example screenshot (also showing my high-framerate and, for the most part, high-bitrate test suite I use for benchmarking the new HDMI adapter):
Warning
1, During the testing (the current, 2.5 version of) iFunBox, I've found it stable. However, with an incompatible video on a non-jailbroken iPad 1 running on iOS 5.1.1, the Videos app stopped working: all it presented was a black screen. Not even restarting the entire device helped this. I needed to clean up the entire Videos library by forcing a Videos library wipeout with reassigning the library synchronized into another, previously non-synchronized iTunes. After the iTunes-initiated Videos library wipeout, Videos started working again.
The same file didn't do anything bad (except for not showing any picture, as opposed to the played-back audio) to my 6.1.2 devices (tested on an iPad 3 and an iPhone 5). The file was a direct Subler remux (with AC3 → AAC audio conversion) of the MKV file discussed and linked to from
HERE. Note that, unless you transfer plain incompatible videos to your iDevice, this is very unlikely to happen - iFunBox, in its present state, worked without such problems with playable videos.
If you encounter the same (black screen problems), do the same that is, uncheck the
Sync Movies checkbox in the Movies tab in iTunes you have synched the device to. (Or check it in if you haven't ever synched videos to your iDevice. It'll also wipe out all the existing videos.)
2, iFunBox doesn't transfer any kind of metadata in the files (if they exist), including (possible) chapter info and, as has already been mentioned, the main video thumbnail to be presented in the file list.
Other discussion
I've created the high-bitrate, high-framerate, high-resolution videos for benchmarking Apple's latest Lightning-HDMI adapter, which received a lot of misinformation (see
THIS article for more info). I'm discussing the adapter in the above-linked thread. Probably my most important posts in the thread on the results of my already-done tests of the HDMI adapter, as of Friday evening (will post a lot more on the weekend!), are
THIS,
THIS,
THIS and
THIS. As you can see, apart from the somewhat bigger lag of the adapter, making it pretty much unsuitable for action gaming, I like the adapter pretty much. (Some of the answers I've received are
HERE,
HERE,
HERE and
HERE.)
EDIT (Sunday): THIS post also shows how important it is to be able to transfer videos to iDevices not officially supported by the iTunes synchronization.
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Other stuff: I've very thoroughly checked the mirroring quality of standard text. I could in no way spot excessive compression artefacts - or, for that matter, any kind of static JPEG compression artefacts around letters. I don't know where the following shot (from the original Panic article) is from, but the situation is definitely MUCH better:
http://www.panic.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/jpegcompression.jpg
The reason for this may be that I may have an adapter with a newer, better firmware, or, the Panic folks just messed up something? Dunno.
EDIT: 1, What is more, iFunBox's video import works on all iOS versions (I've specifically tested 6.1.2 and 5.1.1), iDevice models (I've tested both iPhones (including the iPhone 5) and iPads (incl. the iPad 1) and without jailbreaking.
2, changed the embedded Panic image to a link.
