Does anyone ACTUALLY have a 720p movie on the iPhone 4?!?!?

file type might not be compatible

Can't see the purpose of putting an actual 720p clip on an iPhone - that's 1280x780 pixels, and quite large in terms of file size. You're better off using something like HandBrake, along with the presets that LifeHacker created that will take content of that size or larger (like full HD stuff at 1920x1080) and reduce it - with EXTREMELY high quality encoding - to the native 960x640 screen (landscape) on the iPhone 4.

Along with the reduction in resolution to fit the screen pixel for pixel, you'll get a huge drop in the file size, typically on the order of about 30-40% smaller which means you can potentially put more of them on the phone as well as it taking less time to do the actual transfer of data as well.

Win-win-win situation, pretty rare thing.

Actually, and I don't know if with movies is the same, but I have right in my iPhone, full 720p music videos, and let me tell you, they look just extraordinary, now I don't have to buy cheap iTunes MV, now that the device supports 720p video.

I was kinda supprised that my dad's EVO does not support these, it only plays the audio, lol fail.

Anyway, the iPhone should support the 1280x780 videos.

Dark K said:

Actually, and I don't know if with movies is the same, but I have right in my iPhone, full 720p music videos, and let me tell you, they look just extraordinary, now I don't have to buy cheap iTunes MV, now that the device supports 720p video.

I was kinda supprised that my dad's EVO does not support these, it only plays the audio, lol fail.

Anyway, the iPhone should support the 1280x780 videos.

Click to expand...

It's not just because of the resolution, there is a very specific format in terms of how the video is encoded that matters when it comes to playback on the iPhone/iPod touch, and the iPhone 4 is really no different. As long as you match the encoding parameters that are allowed, it'll play, but if it's off (such as using a Baseline profile for h.264 encoding instead of Main Profile 4.1 or whatever) it's not going to work.

Gets complicated really fast, suffice to say HandBrake can produce such files without issues. If you're not interested in using those LifeHacker presets, use the Apple Universal preset which - by name - will produce output that plays on any current Apple device, any of them. iPhones, iPod touchs, iMacs, Macs, MacBooks, Apple TV, etc - that's why it's called the Universal preset.

The issue with the EVO is the encodings - they're not made to play on it (because of the encoding parameters), so it's not going to handle them.

I have Avatar and Alice In Wonderland in 720p on my iP4. They look awesome...nearly 3D. I used HandBrake on my i5 MacBook Pro. Converted in about 45 minutes to a 4.5 GB file. Looks stunning! I'm putting Book Of Eli on to replace AIW tomorrow.

As many have mentioned, Handbrake is your friend for this job. Coming from the iPhone 3G this was the first thing I tested with the iPhone 4 and I could not be happier with results. It's stunning to watch movies and some tv shows in this resolution and on nothing less than a phone. I can't wait for the next iPad with the same specs!

I have The Book of Eli in 720p on my phone right now and it looks awesome. Kinda cool that a phone can play back the same movies as my AppleTV.

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 4 (32GB): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8A293 Safari/6531.22.7)

I've got several Pixar shorts on my iPhone 4 in both 720p and 480p. To be honest, I can't see much of a difference on this tiny screen. I'll be sticking with 480p for the iPhone, with a higher res copy for the AppleTV and iPad.

If you're new to creating encodings, and you choose to use HandBrake, my suggestion - to keep things pretty simple for you - is just choose the Apple Universal preset. That will create content (regardless of resolution) that will play on any and all current (within the past 3 years or so) Apple devices except one: the iPod nano since it's just not powerful enough to handle high resolution content.

For the nano, you'd choose the Classic iPod preset and get workable results.

Orange™ said:

So I decided to go the route of 720p through Handbrake, as it seems to be the crowd favorite around here! I used the life-hacker preset which is 720p for iPhone 4 and it's encoding now! Is says the output will be 1264x528. While close to 720p, it's not quite there... Any ideas?

It might be the movie, The Dark Knight, because it has 2 different aspect ratios in the film, one being wide screen while the other imax.

Will try with a different movie once this is done and give an update tomorrow morning! Thanks for all the suggestions so far!

Click to expand...

That's perfectly normal, given a few pixels. The way video encoding works is highly complex math going on, but the basic gist is that the resolution needs to be multiples of 16 so... 1264x568 is about right, the max you could get in there would be 1280 which is 1264+16; the 568 number comes from it being a 720 pixel tall image originally but that's because the original encoding has the "black bars" for letterboxing at the top and the bottom of the actual video image to make it fill out the 1280x720 frame.

If you take 568 from 720 you're left with 152 pixels, which means there's 71 lines of "nothing" at the top, 71 at the bottom. HandBrake is coding efficiently by not even bothering to encode that wasted space since it's nothing but black bars.

When you're done you'll have a video that's all content, top to bottom and side to side, and it'll fit the iPhone 4 screen nicely (albeit it might have some letterboxing because of the aspect ratio. If you put a 2:35:1 aspect ratio movie on a 16:9 screen, technically the video is much wider than tall so you'll get "black bars" even so (the iPhone displays nothing there).

If the movie you're encoding is listed as 16:9 aspect ratio (on the box, maybe, someplace, or on the disc itself) the iPhone 4 screen is 16:9 ratio so that movie when shrunk down would fill it top to bottom and side to side completely.

Hopefully that makes some sense... you'll be fine.

I keep getting errors too. Tried two reses and neither synced. iTunes also takes for ever to change it its self too and I doubt that's HD

Orange™ said:

So I decided to go the route of 720p through Handbrake, as it seems to be the crowd favorite around here! I used the life-hacker preset which is 720p for iPhone 4 and it's encoding now! Is says the output will be 1264x528. While close to 720p, it's not quite there... Any ideas?

It might be the movie, The Dark Knight, because it has 2 different aspect ratios in the film, one being wide screen while the other imax.

Will try with a different movie once this is done and give an update tomorrow morning! Thanks for all the suggestions so far!

Click to expand...

It all depends on the source ratio. Handbrake will encode to fit the width then the height.

Anybody got a link to this said Handbrake software? Is it free?

I dont want to download from some random site off google
Cheers

http://handbrake.fr - the home of HandBrake

bobright said:

Anybody got a link to this said Handbrake software? Is it free?

I dont want to download from some random site off google
Cheers

Click to expand...

http://handbrake.fr