Chicken Donut

Kate and I hit the road of life this afternoon, destination marriage! On the way to Pawleys just outside of Augusta we ran into an unbelievably bright double rainbow. The last few days have been freakishly calm for T-minus-almost-nothing till the wedding so we were both all smiles already. This definitely put us over the top. Thirty seconds later Kate pointed out that I was sporting a world class moose knuckle and I couldn’t resist the pic.

Kate and I decided to take some time for ourselves before the wedding week craziness starts and spend some qt on a quick day hike. We went on a two hour round trip hike up Blood Mountain from the Neels Gap trail head. The best part of the hike had to be on the way down when Kate said “You know I probably should not say this but have I ever told you that I have never broken a bo…” and proceeded to trip over a root and just manage to catch herself before doing some serious pre-wedding facial damage. Priceless.

My first attempts at encoding video for the iPhone created videos that left a black border around the picture. A little googling found some recomended resolutions for different aspect ratios

These are the settings I’ve been using:

For 1.33:1 – 480 x 352 or 432 x 320
For 1.78:1 – 480 x 272
For 1.85:1 – 480 x 256
For 2.35:1 – 480 x 204

I encode them all H.264 at 500kbps. Some of the movies such as The Big Lebowski that I originally did were at 700kbps and that only takes up around 700MB total and looks fantastic.

…

Well, the iPhone screen is 480 x 320 pixels, right?

I would encode the videos so that zoomed in, it has the native resolution of the screen. I assume that playing videos like this takes a little less CPU power, as no pixels have to be resized.

Put simply, make all your widescreen videos 320 pixels high. I say widscreen because a video with 4:3 ratio would be 427 pixels wide, i.e. less than the screen resolution. So for 4:3 movie, take the width as reference. Besides, it’s so annoying to have the letterboxes on the sides

So: 4:3 -> 480 x 360

For other aspect ratios, just keep the height on 320 pixels and the width will adjust in handbrake. Don’t use anamorphic encoding, we want square pixels.