iPhone Video Converter

There are many iPhone video converters that simply converts videos from any format to another for both Mac and PC. If you search the internet for video converters you will find so many of them that are free.

I will discuss a more efficient way of playing none supported video formats on the iPhone. This method does the conversion on the fly and saves you lots of time and storage space on both your iPhone and your computer. Also, I will mention a couple of the free video converters that convert video to iPhone the traditional way.

Moreover, with the power of the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, it is now possible to decode any type of video in real time and play on the iPhone with many iPhone movie players from the App store.

Free Traditional Video Converters for Mac & PC:

Videora is one of the best free iPhone video converters available for both Mac and PC. It can convert any video format to the supported iPhone mp4, H264 encoded format.

Also try Free iPhone Video Converter which is available for PC only.

Some of the video formats that are not supported by the iPhone are avi, divX, and wmv. This could be a little annoying, as most of videos available on the internet are wmv and avi formats. Imagine having a big library of avi or wmv videos that you already have on your computer hard drive, that you like to play on your iPhone.

A traditional iPhone video converter will convert all those file formats to mp4 so that the iPhone can read them. This is not only time consuming but also inefficient as you will end up having two copies of the same video, the original plus the iPhone version.

Moreover, after the conversion, you have to transfer the converted mp4 video file to your iPhone using iTunes which eats more of your space on the iPhone .

Every iPhone video converter use the same inefficiency to convert video no matter what you do. One iPhone video converter might be a little faster than the other, but at the end converting video take a long time and space on your desktop computer and your iPhone.

On the fly video converter:

The solution is to use an iPhone video converter that converts and streams video from your computer directly to your iPhone.

This is simply the best way to play any video from your computer on your iPhone. It does the conversion on the fly, while the video is playing in real time.

Those kinds of converters have a server side application, which is installed on the desktop computer, and a client side application, which runs on the iPhone.

When installing and running the server application on your Mac or PC, your computer becomes a video streaming station. When you run the client app on your iPhone, it will find the server (your computer) if it is on the same network and it will start receiving the video stream and displaying it on your iPhone screen.

You can browse your computer video files right from your iPhone, and play any video no matter what video format it is. If the video can be played on your PC or Mac then it can be played on your iPhone.

When you click on a video to play it, your desktop computer does all the heavy work. It does the conversion in real time, and it sends the resulted converted video to your iPhone.

Your computer must be on and the server application must be running. OrbLive and Air Video are two iPhone applications that do this perfectly:

OrbLive:

OrbLive is a video and TV streaming solution of your existing videos on your Mac or PC. It costs $10 and it also streams internet TV, music, photos and cable TV from a connected iPhone TV tuner.

It converts any video format playable on the PC or Mac, and feeds it the iPhone. You can play DVD to iPhone or vob to iPhone by simply selecting the vob files from the iPhone file browser. Visit the ORBLive page to learn more.

It converts avi to iPhone, flash to iPhone or flv to iPhone. And it also converts wmv to iPhone. It is a great video to iPhone converter, and all this happens on the fly without the need for a storage on your Desktop computer or iPhone.

The ORB website has many free server applications for several platforms. After you select your server application and install it, you can set up your video directories on your PC. Those are the directories that contain all your video files, DVD’s, avi, wmv, or divx.

Air Video:

Air Video is one of my best iPhone applications available in the App Store, and it is only $2.99.

It does a similar job as OrbLive but for video only. There is no TV, music, photo, webcam, or documents support. But some people like me care only about video streaming, and Air Video does the best job in that regard.

The video quality of this app is amazing and is much better than OrbLive. You simply install Air Video free server on your Mac or PC from here, and add any video directory you like to see on your iPhone to the shared folder in preferences.

Then run Air Video on your iPhone. All the videos from the shared directory in your computer will be available to your iPhone if you are on the same network. You can select the conversion quality, the size of the screen and many other settings to optimize the video playback.

Air Video makes it very simple to play your video from an outside network also. All you have to do is to check “enable access from the internet” from server preferences on your Mac or PC. Then you will get a PIN number from the server which you can enter on your iPhone to access that computer. Visit the Air Video page to learn more.

Conclusion:

Both OrbLive and Air Video are great real time iPhone video converters allowing you to view unsupported video files on the iPhone. I use OrbLive to stream internet TV, and use Air Video to stream all other video files like wmv, avi, and flv.

With both OrbLive and Air Video, the conversion depends on the speed of your computer. Therefore, for best performance you need a fast computer as minimum.

Since the conversion takes place on your desktop computer, you don’t have to worry about file formats, storage on your computer, or storage on your iPhone. All the conversions are done on the fly in real time.

With the fast iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, is is now possible to decode those non supported video files on the iDevice without the need for an iPhone video converter.

Visit the iPhone movie players page to learn about iPhone applications like like VLC Media Player or Oplayer to transfer, and play any video file format including avi, wmv, DivX, and many more.

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