Guide to iPhone, iPad, iPod Video Formats
The 960×640 resolution of the iPhone 4 provides for over 300 pixels per inch of great glossy viewing. The great innovation on Apple’s part brings great devices into your pocket which you can use to download or stream digital media to your heart’s content. The iTunes store is specifically pre-installed on all of Apple’s devices so you can download movies, shows, and songs to your delight. There is a small downside to the whole Apple proprietary software thing, and that is the fact that you can’t play just any old video format, it has to be a specific video format supported by the iPhone/iPad/other Apple device. This usually means that whatever video you download from a source, you will most probably have to use a third party conversion tool to convert it to the supported format. The iPhone and iPad support MPEG-4 or H.264 encoded videos.
When you download content from the iTunes store, naturally it will be encoded in a format that the Apple device can support. However, if you are one who downloads videos from the internet that, content will probably need to be encoded. On the other hand, you can use websites like mobilereel.net to download movies that are already playable on your iPhone or iPad. If you, download content outside of mobilereel and the iTunes store, you will need to encode it into MP4 format, which will give it the best quality for the smallest file size. H.264 will tend to provide higher quality but also larger file size and encoding time.
The resolution and bit rate of the files also matters when referring to video quality on an Apple device. The resolution is found by multiplying the number of pixels wide the screen is by the number of pixels high, such as 960×640. The bit rate is the amount of data that is encoded in a single second of that video format. The higher both of these numbers are the higher the video quality will be but this will almost always result in a higher file size as well, so you will have to compromise between quality and file size depending on the amount of movies you plan on downloading/watching. The bit rate and resolution work together, the resolution being the number of pixels on a screen and the bit rate being how high quality and full of data those pixels are. Frames per second, or FPS is another property of video that helps determine quality. The “frame rate” of a video is the number of individual frames (images) that are in each second of video. NTSC (North American TV) is approximately 30 fps, and movies you see at a theatre are typically 24 fps. It is important to consider the file size of a video you’re encoding. The file size of a video corresponds with the bit rate of a file. To find the file size do (bit rate / 8 ) * (minutes of video * 60). The resulting size will be in kb if a kbps bit rate was used and megabytes if an mbps bit rate
was used.