Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

HD TV shows play on iPhone?

C

camarobh

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 17, 2007
360
22
San Diego, CA
Will HD TV shows in iTunes 8 sync to my iPhone (yes I know they are very large). Right now I can watch my content on either of my two Apple TVs, my iPhone, or my iMac. If I can't sync HD TV shows to my iPhone does that mean I have to buy two versions of every show?

Do you think that perhaps 2.1 will enable this?

Thanks.
 
lol whats the point of viewing 1080p videos on a iPhone with such a small screen and resolution
 
neiltc13 said:
When you buy an HDTV show you also get an SD version included too.
Click to expand...

That certainly is a nice feature, but do you think Apple really wants to shell out for all that extra bandwidth? Who wants two versions of videos in your library. I'm thinking the iPhone may support playback of HD video with the 2.1 update. :(
 
basically, no, iphone / ipods cannot play the HD tv shows and a low res does not dl with the high-res one. Also bare in mind if you were able to sync HD vids (as to have 1 library of vids) the extra processing power would take a much larger toll on the battery.
 
Personally I think playing HD video on the iPhone would be stupid. A waste of memory, processing power, battery life, you name it. Yes I know TV-out would be one reason but IMO that's trying to do too much with the phone. There are better more efficient ways to play HD video on a TV.

I have about 2500 songs in my iTunes library and that already limits me to loading a small number of SD movies on my 16 GB iPhone. I'm not going to start trying to play 4 GB HD movies on it or even waiting the long time it would take to sync a file that size to the phone.
 
speakerwizard said:
basically, no, iphone / ipods cannot play the HD tv shows and a low res does not dl with the high-res one. Also bare in mind if you were able to sync HD vids (as to have 1 library of vids) the extra processing power would take a much larger toll on the battery.
Click to expand...

Actually a standard definition version DOES download with the HD version purchased on iTunes. iTunes is even smart enough to know which version to sync to the Apple TV (HD) and to the iPhone (standard definition version).

Yes, that means duplicate copies in your iTunes library, but the standard definition version is free with the HD version, and I can continue to watch content on my iMac, iPhone, or Apple TV, and hard drive space is cheap.
 
bushido said:
lol whats the point of viewing 1080p videos on a iPhone with such a small screen and resolution
Click to expand...

The point of the original question is retaining my ability to view my content on all my devices, as I can now. If I had to purchase both the HD and standard definition versions that wouldn't be good. I was hoping that iTunes would be smart enough to down-convert the HD content to something the iPHone could play. The solution that I discovered already exists (iTunes downloads both versions when you purchase the HD version) takes more space, but it works.
 
camarobh said:
Actually a standard definition version DOES download with the HD version purchased on iTunes. iTunes is even smart enough to know which version to sync to the Apple TV (HD) and to the iPhone (standard definition version).

Yes, that means duplicate copies in your iTunes library, but the standard definition version is free with the HD version, and I can continue to watch content on my iMac, iPhone, or Apple TV, and hard drive space is cheap.
Click to expand...

hhmm, strange, mine didnt download a low res version, maybe cause it was a free one?
 
I think the iphone MIGHT be able to play 1080p videos but there is no way it would survive 2 hours on full and I mean full CPU + full GPU. the power drain would be immense!. Remember that if you get a 1080p movie and play it at home it will run fine on a pentium 4 but if you add DRM and encryopt it you need a massive CPU along with either a specialst chip or a graphics card to help out. I would think that apple will also have DRM on the files meaning that you might need a decent system to play these so I would say the iPhone is out.

Also in 1080P a move is 8GB so a show about 2Gb. so not many shows will fit
 
barryallott said:
I think the iphone MIGHT be able to play 1080p videos but there is no way it would survive 2 hours on full and I mean full CPU + full GPU. the power drain would be immense!. Remember that if you get a 1080p movie and play it at home it will run fine on a pentium 4 but if you add DRM and encryopt it you need a massive CPU along with either a specialst chip or a graphics card to help out. I would think that apple will also have DRM on the files meaning that you might need a decent system to play these so I would say the iPhone is out.

Also in 1080P a move is 8GB so a show about 2Gb. so not many shows will fit
Click to expand...

and again as mentioned above the only valid reason for wanting HD on the iPhone is for video out and I dont think they will do it all for that as not many people use it.
 
ballen420 said:
I downloaded the free copies of The Office and Heroes and both the SD and HD versions downloaded with the single click.
Click to expand...

There appears to be a bug with this and the shopping cart feature. I attempted to get the free HD episode of Heroes yesterday. The shopping cart said it was unavailable, but the episode downloaded when I clicked "buy all." I thought the resolution was a bit low, but it was vertically 480 pixels, so I just thought it was insanely lame that they were calling this "High Definition," (just like their claim of "surround sound").

Now that I see this argument, I went back and checked... same thing with the shopping cart. I turned off the shopping cart and turned on one-click, and viola! BOTH the HD episode and the SD episode are downloading, and the HD episode is 1.64GB, while the episode I downloaded yesterday was only 640MB. Therefore, it appears that HD is broken when using the shopping cart and that we are *all* mistaking the increased SD quality as "High Definition."
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_0_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5C1 Safari/525.20)

I bought the HD version of BSG season 4.0. Both HD and SD versions came with the purchase.
 
I think 720p video would look great on the iPhone, especially since I crop most movies and TV shows I watch. The SD content is compressed at a mediocre quality, at best. If you encode the videos yourself from a great source, then it looks really good on the iPhone, and at a lot of times, great. There would be a huge difference between SD and HD on the iPhone, despite the fact that it's only a 3.5" screen at 480x320. Movies can start to look washed-out on the iPhone up close when cropped in, having it in 720p would fix that and then some. I wouldn't mind watching HD videos on my iPhone, the battery life should still hold up pretty well. The better quality would be worth taking up so much extra space, at least to me.
 
barryallott said:
and again as mentioned above the only valid reason for wanting HD on the iPhone is for video out and I dont think they will do it all for that as not many people use it.
Click to expand...

the reason you won't see HD video on iphone is because it doesnt have anywhere near the power to decode it unless it was seriously bit starved.

Seriously, some of you guys who think a 424mhz single core mobile CPU that can't even run multiple phone apps at the same time has enough horsepower to decode a 1080p stream when dual core 2GHZ desktop class CPU can't really need to use a little bit of common sense.
 
wreckshop said:
the reason you won't see HD video on iphone is because it doesnt have anywhere near the power to decode it unless it was seriously bit starved.

Seriously, some of you guys who think a 424mhz single core mobile CPU that can't even run multiple phone apps at the same time has enough horsepower to decode a 1080p stream when dual core 2GHZ desktop class CPU can't really need to use a little bit of common sense.
Click to expand...


If you read my post before this one I say that the iPhone prob does not have the power. There are software codecs outthere that are very quick and do not need a powerfull processor take CoreAVC. but yes I agree. HD + iPhone are not really made for each other and HD on iPhone is as pointless as a choc kettle.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back