iPhone Life - Best Apps, Top Tips, Great Gear

From the ease of collecting often-broken colored pencils, to cleaning up after a room of young artists who seemingly bathed in tempera, art, unlike literature or history, creates rather messy educational challenges.  It is, however, extremely important for learners to engage in visceral exercises that bring the texture of media to hands, and its odor to nostrils.

The annual Macworld/iWorld trade show is underway in San Francisco, and Macworld magazine already has named its Best of Show winners. They include some gotta-see gadgets for the iPad and iPhone, such as an iPad robot, an iPad case that doubles as a speaker, and a 1TB external hard drive for the iPhone and iPad.

In my Video Metadata bible & Roundup, I've already mentioned Subler is capable of manually editing / adding video metadata. After having been asked (thread with numerous, advice-packed posts from me) about doing the same with Subler, I've decided to publish a writeup on doing the same automatically. After all, online video metadata libraries like themoviedb.org have excellent metadata for a lot of flicks.

In the update section of my previous article on advanced location and camera direction tagging of videos, I've already mentioned the built-in video recorder of Ubipix, currently, the only iOS application to record truly dynamic, almost (metadata is sampled every second) frame-level location and direction info, doesn't really have a decent video recorder.

Over at MacRumors (thread), I've been asked to compile a list of players that can vertically stretch a video so that it entirely fills the iPad's screen. During this, it does sacrifice the right aspect ratio and does distort the image. However, at least it doesn't cut off the sides.

Here's a 16:9 movie (my well-known resolution chart video available for download HERE) not filling in the (much taller) screen vertically in the built-in stock Videos app:

Back in the Windows Mobile / Symbian days, in 2007, I've already published a full roundup of then-current UPnP (desktop) server and mobile client apps (see THIS / THIS). Now, let's take a look at how it is done on the iDevice (iPad [Mini] / iPhone / iPod touch)!

As you may have guessed, the stock video player shipped with iOS, “Videos”, doesn't support accessing UPnP (also known as DLNA; in this article, I refer to it as “UPnP”) servers. That is, you'll need to use third-party apps on your iDevice. Fortunately, there are several of them.

1. What can you use UPnP for on iOS?

Up until now, I haven't really recommended the otherwise excellent (“thanks” to Apple's overly strict and - in my opinion - when it comes to video playback, absolutely unnecessary restrictions, jailbreak-only) XBMC multimedia player for iPad 3/4 users playing back high-resolution videos.

The reason for this was, as has always been explained in my articles, the lack of Retina screen support.

Now, take a look at the next two screenshots (click the thumbnails to get the original shots! Don't even try to evaluate the video playback resolution using the thumbnails):

WARNING: This review is graphics heavy!

Note: Due to security concerns for my iPad and iPhone I decided not to include device information screenshots for them. However, you can access any iOS device information by clicking on the Devices button next to the iTunes Store/Library button on the right upper side.

 

Yes, there is a new icon! :) It does look better than the previous version.

 

The Closed Captioning bible

By Werner Ruotsalainen

There is a lot of confusion (see for example THIS) around Closed Captions (CC for short); they are routinely mistaken for traditional, textual subtitles (subs for short), even in the non-TV-streaming / DVD, that is, strictly Apple world. In this article, I've elaborate on the difference, the CC-to-subs conversion and the rendering of the original (Apple) CC's in desktop and iOS players.

1. The difference between CC and textual subs

1.1 Apple's CC

As you may already know (see for example THIS), the previous iPhone model, the iPhone 4S, couldn't truly record video with more than 30 frames per second (fps) without, by 50%, decreased vertical resolution and (with the 1080p-native 4S) switching to 720p resolution. Now, let's take a look at how the iPhone 5 behaves in this respect! Can it record 30+ fps video at all?

 

iPhone 5’s have literally been flying off the shelves since their release a couple of months ago! Anyone who has a new iPhone 5 and is active, accident prone or outdoorsy; you should listen up.

 

And, with the Holiday season upon us, even if none of those traits apply to you, this is still good information to bookmark. After all, an iPhone 5 heavy-duty case can make a great Holiday gift for someone in your life who does happen to fall into the above-mentioned categories!

 

To that end, I have rounded up some of the best, rugged protection, heavy-duty iPhone 5 cases out there.  Featuring the Lifeproof frē, the Griffin Suvivor, the Otterbox Defender, Ballistic's Hard Core, Trident's Kraken, and Seidio's Convert. Read on after the break for full review details!

The player I recommend (review; another, MKV-specific one), along with the (currently, not AppStore-based) AVPlayer(HD), the most for non-DTS (that is, mostly, AC-3) MKV's on non-jailbroken devices has been BUZZ Player - it has had one of the best MKV behind-the-curtains demuxing and hardware playback.

UPDATE (10/10/2012): at DPReview, I've written a quick tutorial on how you can directly review and delete photos off your storage cards using this hack via BUZZ Player 4. See THIS.

Original article:

Have you ever envied Android / Symbian / BlackBerry / Windows Mobile (and even the forthcoming Windows Phone 8) users because of the freedom they have because of the storage cards? Now, you'll get an answer!

I've continuously been asked (see for example THIS and THIS) about how you can play back videos residing solely on an external, Camera Connection Kit (CCK)-compliant (that is, an SD card or a micro/mini one with an adapter)  storage card - or a compatible USB memory key. Up until now, I've always referred my readers to articles / videos like THIS and THIS (see the bullet starting with "Ripped movies: if you have any ripped movies or personal videos, you can use the CCK to add extra storage to the iPad"). Unfortunately, tutorials targeted at jailbroken users (for example, THIS one) haven't used symbolic links (the “magic” we'll make use of) either, meaning they relied on the built-in video / image viewer of iFile. The multimedia support of the latter isn't anything to write home about – it can only play back native iOS formats and has absolutely no advanced features.

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