Compressing for Smart phone

[Craig Seeman]

[Michael Neel] ” I’d like to have it play on a smart phone (even older models)”

Once you add in older models all bets are off. You’re in for either a horrible lowest common denominator or several separate encodes.

On the other hand if you want to include iPhones and Androids and such you could use H.264 Main Profile Level 3.1 but might be safer with Baseline 2.1.

I mean do you REALLy want to support EVRC or AMR audio and H.263 video?

If you’re going to target you should look at recent analytics and know what’s being used to view stuff online by mobile and decide what you choose NOT to support.

[Michael Neel]

LOL, yeah I don’t want to make something that looks bad on almost everything just to please everybody.

I think targeting iPhones and Androids makes the most sense. Baseline 2.1 is probably the safest bet since I’d like this video to be seen by the largest audience possible.

I forgot to mention that I could use either premiere or Compressor. Which would you recommend?

Thanks for your quick response. These forums have saved me so much aggravation over the years.

[Craig Seeman]

I’d guess the Compressor’s iPhone presets would work. You should probably double check on an Android phone. Cover iOS and Android and you’ve really got a good portion of the mobile web market.

I’m not a fan of Compressor’s interface. It keeps too much hidden like Profile and Level. You can check that in a free utility like MediaInfo though.

[Michael Neel]

Cool, I have an Android phone so I should be able to see how it works on it.

I’ll check out MediaInfo.

Thanks for the info, Craig.

[Chris Blair]

You’ll also want to definitely check any iPhone versions because many of the presets that come in compression software (even high-end ones) doesn’t work right. For instance, Carbon Coder and ProCoder’s built in iPhone presets in fairly recent versions of their software produce great looking encodes, but they won’t play on iPhone version 3.x and higher. You can even follow an Apple tech writer’s blog instructions (to the letter) for inputting settings in those and other compression apps and the resulting files STILL don’t play on the iPhone without iTunes wanting to convert them.

https://homepage.mac.com/qt4web/compressforiphone.html

Handbrake’s and MPEG Streamclip’s presets do work nicely but if you have a lot of files to encode, you can’t batch load a bunch of sources and walk away and let it do it’s thing. You have to do them one at a time.

Here’s some other helpful info from our blog along with a list of our experiences outputting for the iPhone.

https://www.videomi.com/blog/?p=130

It was written for Windows users but there’s still good information in there that applies to settings as well as good info about Handbrake and MPEG Streamclip, which are cross-platform.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog

[Michael Neel]

Great, thanks Chris! I appreciate your advice. I want to know as much as I can about this topic. I’ll check out the links you posted.