Picking a HD video from library in iOS4 shows 'compressing video', results in horribly compressed video

Question

Why is it that if I pick a video from the library in my application I'm given this horribly pixelated/compressed video but if I take the video with the camera in my application I'm given a nice video file, this is on the iphone 4.

Sample of video taken w/in the app: http://photos.smugmug.com/photos/912709066_Kcc8p-1280.mp4

Sample of video picked from the library: http://photos.smugmug.com/photos/912709325_hw7Bv-1280.mp4

Both are 720p. Setting videoQuality to 'UIImagePickerControllerQualityTypeHigh' doesn't help, which makes sense really since that appears to be just for setting the recording resolution when using the camera.

Sam

Answer 1

i had the same assumption as Shizam till i saw an FTP app upload a video just fine on an iPhone 4. its not the quality of the imported video thats the problem. if you download the app's sandbox and look at the imported video you will see its fine.

go to Window/Organizer and select your device. there will be a list of Applications in the bottom right. select the app in question and click the expansion triangle. you will see "Application Data" click on the little black downward arrow and tell it when to save the data. then go look at the video in the tmp folder. you will see its fine.

the problem comes when you try to send it out via HTTP. for what ever reason Apple decided to add an extra crappy video compression to videos sent over HTTP. if you FTP the file to the server the video quality is actually very good similar to what you get when you email the video to yourself. Apple gives you a working example of how to FTP to and from a server.

Answer 2

See my post here. You can improve the quality by changing some settings. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3159061/avoid-video-compression-when-selecting-movie-with-uiimagepickercontroller/3337238#3337238