Help needed on some video compression. I have an app currently in the app store which consists of about 30 video's and they range from 40MB to 70MB. Im trying to use iMovie and even played with Handbreak to try and compress these without losing quality. The reason for this is because to download my app, it takes about 1GB of data on the iPhone/iPad which isn't very attractive. Anyone have any tips on compressing and the exact export settings they use? I can send people an example video to be played with if that helps I could go down the 'streaming video' route, but its not really the route i want to take because it takes my app 'offline'. I need to run this app myself on my iPad when i dont have network/wifi coverage, so the videos have to be in the build. Thoughts welcome! Thanks Steve

Well... You could zip archive them (individually), then unzip them programatically. Then destroy all the unzipped copies when the user is done with that movie. In my experience .zips usually slice in half the file. So that's one place you can start. You could also have the user download .zips for offline usage and allow .mp4 streaming of movies of their choice. Well those are all my ideas. -tM

That sounds a bit technical and not something i could do with the AT53 Video Player plugin ? because that is what i am currently using

Search google and buzztouch for handbrake. I guy posted his settings video in the forum and it is excellent.

HandBrake is the answer. Use the iphone preset....

here is the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBXRWSjmHRk i haven't tried the presets yet i must compare but using the above my video loses lots of lbs and kilos :)

I know you're looking for compression on already made videos... but the size of the video has a lot to do with how it was made. In case you can't compress the videos effectively, you might want to remake them. I spent a lot of time trying to minimize the size of my videos. Are your videos screencasts? If so, you can reduce the size of the videos by reducing the resolution of your monitor. I do all my screen casts on 1024*768. I've always found that iMovie significantly (like 2-3x) expands the size of my video while reducing image quality. I found iMovie to be the worst tool for my screencasts, I suspect it was inserting metadata in there that screwed everything up. Have you tried making your videos with ScreenFlow? I've only just downloaded ScreenFlow, but it appears to be the most effective tool I've found that reduces video size while maintaining image quality. They have a 30 day trial if you want to experiment. If you get the trial don't buy it right away, they'll send you an email offering you a 10-15% discount towards the end of the month. If you buy it from their website you can use it on two different computers. I understand that if you buy it from the Mac App Store, you can use it on 5 different computers that use your Apple ID. If you don't want to spend the money on ScreenFlow (which I resisted for awhile), my other suggestion is to use QuickTime... but be careful here. Make your screencast using QuickTime, do all your post-production (like adding sound, trimming, etc) on the unexported movie, and then export the movie using the iPad setting (Don't edit the exported movie). After exporting the movie, then run it through Handbrake. Make sure you locate and copy and paste the raw video file to a safe location (as opposed to exporting a raw version -- use the original!). Using QuickTime + Handrake, I've been able to get 5 min videos to 12 or so mb. ScreenFlow is better yet, but I don't have the numbers.

I believe they are right, I just looked at Handbrake. Use that and reduce the size that way. You could probably do a lot more compression that way as opposed to my way. -tM