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Well, I made some good progress today with my video distribution system. I had converted some videos this morning using ffmpeg and streamed those to my iPhone over wifi and the edge network. The quality wasn’t great, but it worked. After getting home from school I worked some more with ffmpeg and Quicktime trying to figure out exactly what format I needed for the best balance of speed and quality. I couldn’t seem to get any 3gp videos to stream to the iPhone properly. So, I can make MPEG4 videos that play, great. I was ready to throw in the towel and go to bed when I had a sudden thought. What if I were to write a script that runs each night at midnight and syncs files locally to my iPhone. I wouldn’t ever physically sync my phone and I’d have fresh content on it. I first tried using the Boss Tool plugin for file:// support in Safari. I didn’t have any luck with this. My mind then turned to Apache. What if I hosted a local file on a local http server and played the video embeded in a local html file. Presto! So, with Apache installed I am able to play videos. Tomorrow I will work out some details like how to change where my hosted directory for Apache is on the iPhone so that I can utilize the 7GB partition rather than the 300MB system partition for storing my videos. Then I will hammer out my ffmpeg format and write my script. The script will convert the videos and once I’m asleep each night it will copy them to the phone as well as generate an html page containing each of the videos it has converted. Then, I will watch the videos and delete them as I’m done with them. I’m very excited to get this system going because it will be the first “wireless sync” with usability for the iPhone. I’ll keep you posted with tomorrows developments.