Tips and best practices for your iPhone, best viewed on your iPhone. Remember: Search is your friend.
The easiest way to format video for your iPhone is QuickTime Pro. You won't regret the $30 investment. QT Pro is simple, straightforward and can also be used to record video directly from iSight. QT Pro looks just like your QT player (with a bunch of new features and menu items added) so you'll find the interface very familiar. You can edit movies directly in QT Pro. Users are beginning to prefer this over iMovie, since iMovie '08 has gotten ridiculously confusing to use.
- Drag your video clip into QT.
- From the menu choose File>Export.
- Set the Export Format to Movie to iPhone.
- Press Save.
- Drag the file into iTunes.
- Plug in your iPhone and choose it from the list.
- In the Movie tab check your movie.
That's about as simple as it gets. Quality is restricted by your camera, but if your camera does great video, it will probably look even better on your iPhone. The motion is great and screen is very crisp.
Your iPhone is also capable of playing MP4 and 3GP files as attachments in Mail. If you have video on DVD you can use the freeware
Handbrake to convert it to iPhone, provided it's not copyright restricted material. QT Pro and Handbrake as a combo can handle just about any kind of video.
While the iPhone is not designed as a document reader, you can read PDFs, HTML, Word and Excel attachments in email. However PDFs have pages so small they're worthless. Word docs have text so small they're useless and Excel files, well they're Excel files and only useful when viewed on a wide-screen TV. Fortunately in TextEdit you can save files as HTML. With 16 or 18 pt type for body text, these read well as email attachments. You can't add images but if you use proper syntax in proper links created from Format/Text/Links, they work fine. URLs are standard. Email links are mailto:name@domain and telphone links are tel:0000000000. You'll want to check this if you plan on using TextEdit to create Web pages to be viewed in iPhone's Safari.
Mail allows you to view, play and forward attachments in a huge number of common formats. The most common are:
- HTML
- Word
- PDF
- TXT
- Excel
- vCard (You can save attached vCards to Contacts.)
- Standard photo formats.
- WAV
- Unprotected AAC
- MP3
- H.264 Video
- MP4 Video
- 3GP Video
- QT MOV
Sometimes attachments will not open if the sender uses RTF format for email. You will have to ask them to resend in HTML or plain text. Media attachments burned with a codec not supported by QT may also not play. Since attachments remain on the server, you can forward them, even the ones you can't open on your iPhone. The only attachment you can make directly from your iPhone is an image from your camera or Photos.
If you're on Vista you'll find the few posts that are Maccentric marked with at the end of the title so you can easily skip them. If anyone would like to contribute Vista or Linux methods, click my name below and email me the precise steps. You'll find more here about creating this site.
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