Can iPhone show 4:3 movies?

I converted an old 4:3 movie I have to .mp4 using Handbrake like I usually do and tried to load it onto my iPhone, but it won't load because it "cannot be played by iPhone". This isn't the best explanation to help me understand the problem.

Is it possibly because it's 4:3 aspect ratio? That would really suck because there's a lot of old movies I like that are 4:3.

No it's not. There must be something else it doesn't like about it because I have plenty of 4:3 videos on the iPhone.

The only thing I did differently when converting that movie was set an arbitrary file size limit instead of using one of the presets (iPhone/iPod preset). Do you have to use the preset in order to make a file useable by iPhone? I would think anything that would import into iTunes would work on the iPhone, but I guess not since that movie didn't.

iTunes can play many different files that ipods/iphone cannot. Setting a file size limit is rolling the dice since it's unknown if the bitrate will stay under the iphone ceiling or not.

use any well functioning converters to iphone and make sure they do convert the 4:3 movies then you absolutely can watch a 4:3 movies on iphone

Just use ffmpegX. It's fast, great quality, free, and has presets for iPhone.

fleurya said:

The only thing I did differently when converting that movie was set an arbitrary file size limit instead of using one of the presets (iPhone/iPod preset). Do you have to use the preset in order to make a file useable by iPhone? I would think anything that would import into iTunes would work on the iPhone, but I guess not since that movie didn't.

Click to expand...

What was that "arbitrary" file size?

I'd say try it aging with the preset and see what happens. There have been some issues with the presets for the iPhone too.

If you list exactly what settings you used, I may be able to help or at least get you a strait answer.

When I was converting movies with Handbrake using the iPhone preset, they were coming in at 800-900 MB in size. I wanted to try to cut that down so I could fit more movies on my iPhone. So after choosing the iPhone preset, I choose to manually set the size limit to 500MB. I noticed the only thing that changed was the bitrate went from 960 to 616, so maybe that's the issue.

I'm not good with all these format tweaks, so I didn't realize changing that would affect its playability. If anyone knows of a way to lower the file size and still make it playable on the iPhone, I would appreciate the info.

Can you take a screen shot of your setting just before encoding?