Categories: Apple iPhone

iPhone Audio And Video Formats

There’s a lot you can do with the iPhone, this great smartphone, when it comes to listening to digital music. Today it has become a central part of our life; we use it to show off our pictures, watch videos and listen to music. But what Audio File Types or what formats does the iPhone support for listening to digital music?

The iPhone can play quite a lot of different audio formats and if you think that the iPhone only supports the standard AAC format and can only be used with the iTunes Store (because they are both Apple products) you are wrong.

In fact, the iPhone uses certain file types when it creates content, and recognizes many more file types beyond those defaults.

The device actually supports many formats, but knowing about all the audio formats that you can play on your new iPhone is important especially if you want to seriously start using it as your stellar portable media player (PMP). This can be useful if the contents of your music collection has come from different sources (old vinyl records, digitized cassette tapes, and other services, such as ripped CD tracks, etc.) In all these case there’ll be a very good chance that there will be a mix of audio formats.

Among the supported audio formats for the iPhone (3GS / 4 / 4S) are the following formats: AAC (Bitrates 8 to 320 Kbps); HE-AAC, Protected AAC (used for DRM copy protection on the iTunes Store); Apple Lossless (Allac); MP3 (bitrates 8 to 320 Kbps); MP3 VBR (Variable Bitrate); AA (Audible formats 2, 3, 4)/Audible Enhanced Audio/AAX/AAX+; WAV; AIFF. However, if you have files that aren’t recognized by your iPhone, you can usually convert them in iTunes.

But what about videos on the iPhone? While recording videos, the files are saved as H.264 QuickTime files, which use the MOV file format. Videos purchased in the iTunes store are designed specifically to play on iOS devices, as well as in iTunes, and they come in M4V format, with “FairPlay digital rights management” built in. H.264 and MPEG-4 video formats with AAC audio are supported in the video apps. This includes MP4, M4V, MOV

Finally, iPhone saves the photo as a JPG file, and as to texts, you can purchase e-books on your iPhone, or transfer documents from your computer using iTunes. M-JPEG. GIF and TIFF images are all supported as well.The iPhone can read vCard (VCF) information, and manage ZIP files. You can also use it to view DOC/DOCX, RTF, TXT, PPT/PPTX and XLS/XLSX documents. Via Safari you can view HTML pages.