Loud was the rejoicing of the multitudes when they found that yesterday’s QuickTime update added fullscreen playback functionality for even the non QuickTime Pro users. But also in that update was a little bit of iPhone-related news: two new video export formats.
As with the iPod and the Apple TV before it, Apple has tried to make converting video into an iPhone-compatible format as easy as possible. However, the real benefit for this feature is less for those looking to watch movies through the iPhone’s iPod functionality, and more about producing iPhone-compatible videos for the web. Hence the two formats: iPhone and iPhone (Cellular).
I gave them a try this morning: From an 8.47MB 640x480 QuickTime movie, the former produced a 1.2MB 480x360 H.264/AAC encoded video which you can embed in a webpage (when I tried to view it directly on the iPhone, Safari wouldn’t display it properly). It played back smoothly and gorgeously on the iPhone, using the built-in QuickTime player, just like Apple’s iPhone movie trailers.
Exporting in the 3GPP cellular format yielded a 176x132 H.264/AAC encoded video playing at 15fps, but one that weighed in at just 96k. It loaded pretty speedily over the EDGE connection, though the quality was noticeably inferior to the larger movie.
With a little reference movie trickery, you can set up your site to serve up 3GPP or M4V movies to iPhone surfers, depending on their connection speed. Check out Apple’s Developer Guidelines for how to do it.
Until there is a resolution of problems
http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070711140051311#comments
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1039074&tstart=0
one should be very dubious about installing the QuickTime (and iTunes) updates on Intel Macs on which one wants to run Word 2004 and other unimportant things.
Not clear on what exactly is the difference between iPhone and iPhone (cellular). As a user, just want to be able to bring stuff over. Would one be better for me than the other?
I created a m4v movie from a 39meg mov file. The file size shrunk to 5.4meg, which is nice. I suppose a good chunk of this due to the reduction in dimensions from 640x480 to 480x360 and the better compression of MPEG4. I like this a lot.
@andintroducing: The difference is mainly for people who want to put videos up on their site for people to watch on their iPhone. If you just want to move videos over via iTunes, I'd suggest using the standard "iPhone" option (you could also probably get away with using the convert for iPod option as well).
@John: Huh; I don't run Office 2004, so I haven't experienced this, but if it's widespread, that does sound like quite a problem.
@Dan,
More information has surfaced as to the problem between the Quicktime update and Office 2004 applications. First, the problem is between the update and ANY old Carbon application--anything that uses Code Fragment Manager loading.
Second, it now appears that the trigger is the downloadable (by developer program members, including free online members) Java 6.0 beta. On machines without that, there is not supposed to be a problem.
See and subsequent (sometimes acrimonious) discussion. It appears that machines without this *beta* software are OK with the update.