After some shenanigans, I’ve discovered several rules of the road related to iPhone videos. They all pretty much boil down to one rule:
Never ever, ever, EVER take an iPhone video while holding the iPhone upright.
In other words, don’t take a video in portait. No matter how you’ll be tempted. No matter how natural it feels. No matter how good it looks on the screen. No matter how much easier it is to hold your iPhone upright, especially in circumstances when you think you might drop your iPhone into a river, over a ledge, or out of a speeding tuk tuk. If you ever want to download your videos, have them look right, and share them: never ever, EVER take an iPhone video while holding the iPhone upright.
As you’ll see, the video below was taken before I learned this valuable lesson. So, I had to do some rotating and re-encoding and such. And, it still doesn’t look great. But, it makes me smile every time I watch it, remembering what a tight squeeze this was, so I guess it does the job. Enjoy!
Videos here are still a work in progress. I need to work on encoding to get file sizes down. And I’m not sure I’m happy with this particular video player yet. It’s the only one I’ve gotten to work thus far – trying to debug WordPress on Windows GoDaddy using iffy hotel wi-fi in Thailand isn’t the easiest trick. I’ll keep looking for a better html 5 player so that videos are more easily consumed on iPhones and iPads. Stay tuned.
I always like to travel with my “IT guy” for all my debugging & encoding needs!