While shooting our family July 4th video at the Kansas City T-Bones game, I got an error message when I tried to upload it wirelessly to YouTube. Yes, I kept my unlimited data plan so I wasn’t too concerned about the MB’s. But even with the compression and Medium 640 x 360p output, it crapped out on me.
Not to worry though. Where there’s a will, there’s got to be a geeky way.
I uploaded the video to Dropbox instead.
Dropbox is a cloud based storage area. I use it to transfer large business files to clients. I can create a directory, place files in it, and share the directory only with that client. It’s a great service and you get 2 GB’s free to try it out. What was great though was that I could upload a video from my Camera Roll to it. It compressed the file and uploaded it to my Public Dropbox file.
I tried using Box.net too but their app didn’t recognize movies on my iPhone.
Once uploaded to Dropbox, I could quickly share the link via email so I could let the grandparents know that night’s video was available. I also liked the added security knowing that this video wasn’t available on YouTube for the whole world to see. There’s a place for that (like this video!) but sometimes you don’t want everyone to see it. I could have just as easily created a shared directory on Dropbox and uploaded the video there where only they could access the directory. For ease, I just placed it in the Public folder.
Uploaded business, client, and training videos to your Dropbox account can be a great way to immediately share your iPhone videos. And you may find it a little more reliable too.
Scott
Nice video!
Do you have any idea about sharing iPhone – produced videos to DropBox in a more universal format?
Not everyone has QuickTime.
I did a little test whereby I made a video on iPhone and uploaded it to my DropBox public folder. I then e-mailed my wife the link to the video from within my iPhone dropBox app. She has a Windows PC and when we clicked on the link, it came up with “file not recognised”.
Do you know if the iMovie app for the iPhone has the ability to export the *.mov file to a format such as AVI or WMV or flash?
Thanks again.
Peter
New iPhone user as of this week and loving it!
N Wales, UK
Peter,
Thanks for the kind words.
I think you’ll have to move the movie over to your Mac before you can change the file format of the movie. And yes, this is a problem.
iMovie likes to export the movies as .m4v files. This makes it easy to share amongst Mac users but introduces problems with PC’s.
Rendering files on any computer takes a lot of time and you start messing with CODECS and bit rates. iMovie is making it easy on the iPhone but it cuts down on the cross platform sharing.
There are 2 solutions to consider:
First, is to bring the movie from your iPhone to your computer and re-render it in a different format like .avi, .wmv, or .flv
Second would be to use YouTube because they enable cross-platform viewing of your video automatically. So if you’re not worried about sharing it with the world (or if you’re okay with YouTube’s privacy settings) I’d suggest utilizing it for cross-platform distribution.
Hope this gives you some ideas to start with. Congrats on being a new user!