BlogCool iPhone Trick: Video Accelerometer
I’m wrapping up the iPhone review (yes, the full month long one)… and I wanted to point out a cool trick that Apple forgot about.
Apple said that videos always play in widescreen mode… essentially, you can’t hold the iPhone upright and have the video rotate. Or, can you?
Turns out this is a built-in hinderance of the iPod application (MobileMusicPlayer.app). I presume Apple will remove it in the future, as a “new feature”. But for now, the only way to get around it is to play the video in QuickTime (via Safari).
Remember, Safari can play videos so long as they are encoded in H.264B. So, go to Apple’s Movie Trailer for iPhone page, and start playing a trailer. Now, when it starts playing, rotate away! The video will rotate like it always should. Unfortunately, this means you do have to stream the video over H.264B, but now Apple has no excuse for not enabling the feature in iPod and YouTube… they’ve been caught red handed with proof that the iPhone can support it.
Yes, we know, our Video section isn’t H.264B just yet… we haven’t finished our Core 2 upgrade in the office, and our Final Cut Studio 2 system is the last one to get the Core 2 treatment. Opting to go quad-core (Core 2 Quad) for only $679 thanks to Dell made the wait feel a lot less painful on our end.
