An Apple iOS Video Issue

I am always on the hunt for better, cheaper and easier ways to create and deliver content. The more steps that can get pulled out of any process, the more efficient it is and the more likely non-geeks will do it! 

The post you see below (below the line, that is) was created using the WordPress app on iPhone and the video was uploaded from the phone’s library.

What’s the issue? The movie format is a .mov (which is Quicktime) and therefore won’t be playable on a Windows computer (unless it has Quicktime installed), but it does play (albeit very slowly since it’s probably transcoding the video on the fly) on a Windows mobile phone. A .mov will also not play on an Android mobile device without loading a separate software player since .mov isn’t supported natively. Publishing this post/video with the WordPress app also embedded the video with the generic “video” tag which doesn’t allow WordPress plugins (e.g., JetPack) to auto-size the video so it is larger than the post content area (I resized it manually, by the way, so it fits now but that defeats the purpose!).

Sheesh. This could all be avoided if Apple made it simple to compress to .mp4 right within iOS 6. I’d love a setting which allowed me to make a choice to either use Apple’s native and uncompressed .mov, or instead opt to use the standard .mp4 file format which works on both Windows and Android as they support the MPEG standards out of the box.

What’s the workaround? Uploading first to YouTube or Vimeo and then simply pasting the URL into the post itself and JetPack will then automagically place the shortcode tags around the URL, resize it so it fits the content area perfectly, and thus streaming is optimized for all platforms and devices. Yes, it’s a workflow interruptor and a workaround but currently there isn’t a way around it as I can tell. Oh yeah…audio created by iOS is in the .m4a format (again, an MPEG standard) and is playable on every platform so Apple could do .mp4 if they wanted to do so.

Everything below the line is the actual post sent using the WordPress iOS app to create the post and upload the video from my iPhone:

This is a very short video taken in the chapel just outside Seattle before a wedding we attended a few weeks ago. I am posting this to see what it looks like once published on the blog.