Compressing video/tv episodes for iPhone?

[MI21]

Hey guys, just jumped aboard the iPhone bandwagon. Picked up a 16gb 3GS. Pretty cool piece of technology I must admit. It's all pretty new to me though because I've never owned any type of iPod other than a tiny shuffle for use at the gym.

Just wondering, whats the best software out there for reducing the size of tv episodes and sporting events to fit on iPhone?

TV eps are all 350MBish and the sports I want to put on there are no more than 700MB.

I would prefer the software to be free also. I thought I'd ask here because I like to get positive reviews and recomendations from people who have actually used different programs rather than wasting time downloading crap.

Cheers!

(PS: Is there a better way to view Spurstalk on iPhone? It's awfully small. I wish there was a SpursTalk app!)

[Slydragon]

(PS: Is there a better way to view Spurstalk on iPhone? It's awfully small. I wish there was a SpursTalk app!)

On the very bottom left there is a pull down menu and there is a option for iPhone on there. I don't know if it looks better but I seen it when I change between default and wap version of ST on my phone.

[Slydragon]

As for the other Q I used FormatFactory for my Blackberry and my friends PSP, it also has a iPhone setting on there.

I got it off a torrent but on Google this site came up

http://www.formatoz.com/download.html

If you get it there run a virus scan first.

Also make sure you have a codec pack installed, this is what I have

http://www.codecguide.com/download_k...pack_basic.htm

[PM5K]

I'm sure you could get them smaller, but 350MB for a half hour episode isn't bad.

[Borosai]

HandBrake has presets for the iPhone and iPod, but I have neither so I don't know how well they (the presets) work. However, I have ripped a few DVDs with it, and the results were good. You can also adjust the settings if the presets aren't adequate (and save your own presets). If you're using Windows, I'm pretty sure you'll need the .NET framework.

By the way, it's free and open source.

[baseline bum]

You could probably do it with ffmpeg or mencoder. Not sure what resolution you'd do for iPhone (for my iPod I always had 320x240). The audio codec should always be AAC and for video x264 or perhaps xvid (the containers should probably be mp4 and not avi though). ffmpeg is always what I use for encoding video for my iPod, but mencoder's gotta work too. They're UNIX programs, so the do entation is pretty damn terse, but there's plenty of much more readable info online. Also, both programs are readily available on Windows.

Something like the following should work:
Say you want to convert file foo.avi to bar.mp4 in stereo sound (i.e., 2 channels)
resolution: 320x240
video codec: x264 (an open source H.264 implementation)
video bitrate: 768 kbps
audio codec: AAC
audio bitrate: 64 kbps


ffmpeg -i foo.avi -b 768 -s 320x240 -vcodec x264 -ab 64 -acodec aac -ac 2 -f mp4 bar.mp4

-i foo.avi means foo.avi is the input file
-b 768 means the video bitrate is 768 kbps
-s 320x240 means the size, or resolution is 320x240
-vcodec x264 means use x264 as the video codec. xvid is another option that should probably work too, but x264 will prob look better. xvid will take less time to encode.
-ab 64 means set the audio bitrate to 64 kbps (don't worry... 64kbps AAC should sound quite a bit better than 64kbps mp3)
-acodec aac means set the audio to AAC format (iPod's native format, prob iPhone's too since it's the format used at the iTunes store)
-ac 2 means stereo sound (i.e., 2 audio channels)
-f mp4 means stuff the video and sound into an mp4 container. Just a box or a wrapper around the data. -f is for format.

Here's a full reference on ffmpeg if you're interested in picking things like which cosine transform implementation to use or how to set quantizer ranges for variable bitrate.
http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/1/ffmpeg

Here's a link to ffmpeg. Run it from the command line to do the encoding.

http://www.videohelp.com/download/ffmpeg-0.5.7z

[MI21]

Cheers to all of you

I've got some downloading to do. I'll get everything everyone recommended and see which is best.

Oh, and baseline, cheers mate, that's going to help big time.

(this forum is just another reason why SpursTalk owns. Quick, informative and friendly information. Not always easy to find on the net.)

[MI21]

On the very bottom left there is a pull down menu and there is a option for iPhone on there. I don't know if it looks better but I seen it when I change between default and wap version of ST on my phone.

I have the iPhone skin happening but it doesn't really help. The font is small, even if you zoom in a little bit... maybe because im an iPod/iPhone noob I don't know how to zoom in a bit more, but yeah, the whole of SpursTalk is unbearably small.

Anyone else have that problem? Or know how to fix it?

[ElNono]

You can also use MPEG Streamline for either Mac or PC. It has iPhone/iPod Touch presets built in as part of the Export to MP4 option.

[resistanze]

Videora iPhone Video Converter is what I use.

An hour long episode is 300MB after conversion to mp4. So a half show episode should be 150MB.