Newbie iPhone Video Conversion

[nixalot]

All,
I recently just bought a NAS device which has a built-in media server. I have moved all of my pictures and music over and it works great, but video is a new beast to me. There are acronyms out the waazoo and I feel like I'm drowning in the details. I have successfully converted VOB files from our camcorder to mp4 and they play on all of our mobile devices and my PS3. This is my one goal... to find a video format that will be universally compatible with all of our devices. I'm using a server-client setup called Polkast to deliver media to our mobile devices, and the Twonky media server works great for delivering the video to the PS3 directly from the NAS.

The problem I'm having is converting video shot with our iPhones to an mp4 format that is compatible with the PS3. If the video is shot in landscape orientation, it's not a problem. For whatever reason it seems I've been able to convert those videos just find. What's really hanging me up is converting the portrait orientation videos and having them rotate so they won't be laying on their side. I've used avidemux successfully in converting and rotating, but every one of the mp4 types produces a converted video that the PS3 says is incompatible. I've also tried using ffmpeg via Winff with the -vf transpose=1 option. This works in rotating the video, but the mp4 output that works on the PS3 yields a video that is squashed.

I'm just really lost and exasperated at the moment. Does anybody have suggestions of the path I need to take to accomplish what I'm wanting to do? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Nathan

[jman98]

I get that you're new, and welcome, but your use of "landscape" and "portrait" is wrong when describing video. Why on earth would you have rotated videos to begin with? That makes no sense. I assume you are trying to describe widescreen by "landscape" and MAYBE you mean 4:3 by saying "portrait", but your reference to the videos being rotated is baffling. You're going to have to explain in detail why you have such videos to get help with that.

Xvid4PSP is free and has an iPhone output preset that might be able to help you, but if you've really and truly got rotated videos for some bizarre reason, you'll have to dig into the advanced settings and see if it will let you rotate the video.

[smrpix]

ffmpeg has a -vf pad=H:W option but it's function is baffling and ether supersedes or is superseded by -vf transpose=1. You may want to try a regular NLE like Vegas or Premiere which will give you more flexibility and options.

BTW, I've given up urging friends and family to always shoot horizontally with their phones. Vertical is simply part of today's reality.

[_Al_]

"Portrait" video has to be rotated, resized, and you have to pillarbox it (add black bars left and right).
For example 1280x720 video you has to be rotated , resized to 408x720 and black box 436x720 added to the left and right

Avisynth can do it , but it is not straight forward , it takes some time to go through Avisynth set up, script might look like this:

... load 1280x720  clip with something ...
TurnLeft()
LanczosResize(408,720)
AddBorders(436,0,436,0)

you have to load that script into some encoder that accepts avisynth script, you can even batch those clips (encode them at once)

or

as was said, to get some videoediting software load a clip rotate it there and play with it , edit it, but think of it this way you have nice "landscape" clip and you place that rotated clip next to it, it always looks kind of weird, or you have to zoom in, to get rid of black borders, but you loose quality, a big deal, doing this