Expert Blogs
Back in October, upon publishing my tutorial (link) on fixing videos no longer playable in most iOS video players, the then-current version of the tool to be used, MKVTools, wasn't still able to add an AAC track in addition to the original AC3 one without human intervention. (Just to recap: AAC is the iOS-friendly audio format and AC3 is the format that is no longer supported in almost any third-party iOS multimedia players, “thanks” to Dolby's forcing developers to drop the support.)
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
Given that a lot of iOS multimedia developers use my suite of test videos to conformance test their apps (see for example the iPad screenshot HERE, with the latest Moli_player Pro HD (a screen capture link showing my Finnish test video I've created and generally use for DVB TS multiple subtitle and audio track conformance testing)), I found it necessary to dedicate a separate article for a new subset of my conformance and speed test suite so that as many of them get notified of the changes as possible.
I've recommended the video recording tool FiLMiC Pro (AppStore link) in several of my articles (see for example THIS). It allows for a lot of tricks not possible with the stock Camera app - without jailbreaking.
The scene of third-party multimedia players have been pretty stormy lately, which can clearly be seen if you look around in iOS forums with more advanced users. Dolby's forcing all developers to license their (widely used and essential) audio codecs at pretty huge licensing fees has resulted in a lot of players removing Dolby audio support altogether, (pretty understandably – we're speaking of quite a lot of money not possible to pay if you sell, say, under 20-30 000 copies of a, say, $2 app) not being able to pay the money Dolby have demanded.
While not having published a Strategy Guide (as opposed to Orions, the previous “big hit” on both iOS and the preceeding Windows Mobile), I've often mentioned I consider the quite new iOS port of “Spectromancer” (AppStore links: small-screen devices; iPad HD) the best card game on iOS. Opinions may differ, of course – I just prefer the way Spectromancer (and the very closely related Orions) is played to that of Magic (the Gathering) 2013 does.
So far, I haven't recommended nPlayer (initial review; second major article) for (at least high-resolution) MKV playback as its H.264 decoder is considerably inferior to that of the, in this regard, best players. An example of the latter is yaPlayer – which, incidentally, has still not been let back to the AppStore.
1, AnyPlayer
Answering a question HERE, I've thoroughly re-tested the current version (1.5.3) of AnyPlayerHD and found out that it's equally bad (very low-performance decoders, no hardware MKV acceleration etc. etc.) as was the one I reviewed HERE, in late May. That is: this player is still not worth bothering with as there are much-much better players - even for free (for example, iMedia Player introduced below). Stay away!
2, EC Player
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?
I've created a directly deployable .deb installer file of my iPhone 3GS and 4 Video Camera Enhancer tweaks for iOS5+ (see THIS and THIS, respectively, for an explanation, quick tutorial and sources). They allow for installing the tweaks without having to have access to a desktop Xcode. I've also made sure the installers themselves set the right write permissions of the configuration file (and its enclosing directory) they modify upon tweaking the video recording parameters. This means installing them has become orders of magnitude easier.
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