Friday, July 1, 2011

Watching Video on the iPhone

The iPhone is an idea device to watch video on than any previous version of the iPod because of its bigger screen and landscape orientation.
iPhone, with its 3.5 inches screen, is have the best video experience for watching videos. Once you convert video to iPhone compatible formats, you can watch everything including a purchase, rental, or DVD.

The screen will automatically change to a horizontal orientation when you begin watching video on an iPhone. This replicates the horizontal format of TVs and shows the best display of video. It works well generally, but it will cut off the edges of the image for some videos and display a smaller, letterboxed picture. That’s not a terrible thing; it would be wonderful if the playback were smart enough not to force viewers to make it.

Maybe it is a complicated thing for those people who watch movies that benefit from a bigger picture. Letterboxing will not influence intense character-driven movies actually, but one of my test movies was Transformers which surely increases in impact if it gets bigger. I have to choose the letterbox display and its attendant smaller image, so that I can see the whole picture and not lose the edges. Though this may dampen the excitement of certain parts of the movie, it is worthy of seeing the whole picture.
Generally speaking, video looks and sounds great on the iPhone (This is determined by the encoding of the video partly). And movies purchased or rented from the iTunes Store would be excellent.
That’s would be a little taxing for you to hold your iPhone in your hands for a long time to watch a full TV show or movie. You should be holding the iPhone a few inches from your face , and at just the right angle(a little tilt in one direction of the other can make the image too light or too dark), for quite a while. With Transformers, I was clutching and tilting my iPhone for over two hours.
Some iPhone cases try to help with this by including built-in stands. I’m not sure I see the value of this since that assumes that you’re watching the movie in a place with a flat surface. If you’re in such a place, like a home, why not watch the movie on a TV (with adapter cables) or computer?

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