iPhone "cannot play" .mp4 H.264 video file

Question

Hi folks,

I'm trying to setup a simply mobile page for a client with a link to an .mp4 video file. Lke so:

<a href="My_Video_File.mp4" target="_blank">Watch MP4 Video</a>

And then I've obviously got my video file sourced properly and the .mp4 has the following characteristics:

Dimension: 480 * 272
Codecs: AAC, H.264, MPEG-4 SDSM, MPEG-4 ODSM
Channel Count: 2
Total Bitrate: 991
Size: 11.4MB

But, the problem is when I click on the link iPhone says "Movie cannot be played." and doesn't tell me why.

Any help?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I encountered a similar issue and my guess was encoding. I had tried the "iPhone" preset with Adobe Premiere CS4 (Adobe Media Encoder) with no luck.

Running it through ffmpeg with the following did the trick:

ffmpeg -i INPUT -s 320x240 -r 30000/1001 -b 200k -bt 240k -vcodec libx264 -coder 0 -bf 0 -refs 1 -flags2 -wpred-dct8x8 -level 30 -maxrate 10M -bufsize 10M -acodec libfaac -ac 2 -ar 48000 -ab 192k OUTPUT.mp4

I found the above (and many other configurations) here: http://rodrigopolo.com/ffmpeg/cheats.html (I corrected a few typos in their "iPod-iPhone 640 width, without presset" [sic].)

Other searching around will probably yield more information about the encoding requirements (h.264 baseline 3.0) and size requirements for the movie to play on the iPhone.

The official Apple reference on the subject: http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/AppleApplications/Reference/SafariWebContent/CreatingVideoforSafarioniPhone/CreatingVideoforSafarioniPhone.html