TechLoaf.blog - iPhones

How to Play Windows Media Videos on the iPhone

nospam@example.com (Randy Bryan) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 11:45:08 -0700

I have an iPhone. I like it but it frustrates me how tightly Apple controls their stuff. If you use Apple stuff you know what I mean. Well, one of those frustrations for me is not being able to play Windows Media videos (.WMV format) when people email them to me. They are "grayed" out at the bottom of the email which means the iPhone will not try to open it. Finally, I found a way to do it!

Here's what you do:
1) Set up an account with YouTube.

2) Once your account is set up, go to your account options and set up mobile uploading. They will give you a secret email address that only you use to upload your videos to YouTube.

3) On your iPhone, set up a contact called “YouTube.” Add the email address from step 2 to it.

4) Go back to your mail application. Open the email with the .wmv file. FORWARD that email to your new “YouTube” contact. Once it has sent, your email will be on YouTube.

5) Point your iPhone’s Safari browser to http://m.youtube.com. Sign into YouTube from that page. Scroll down to “My Videos.” Your .wmv video should be there. Click on it and it will open in Quicktime on the iPhone.

That’s it!

One more note: Once your video is uploaded, it may take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours for it to be processed AND to be playable on an iPhone. Typically, it takes about 5 minutes.

Use your OWN RINGTONES for free in iPhone 1.1.3 - UPDATE for iTunes 7.6

nospam@example.com (Randy Bryan) — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:27:55 -0700

I posted the other day a new way to use your OWN ringtones for FREE in iTunes 7.4.2.4. You can read that article here. So I wanted to see if my method would work with the latest version of iTunes, version 7.6. Guess what? It Does! So now, you can use your own ringtones on iPhone 1.1.3 and iTunes 7.6. The latest versions of both.

Use your OWN RINGTONES for free in iPhone 1.1.3!

nospam@example.com (Randy Bryan) — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 19:42:08 -0700

I stumbled across a way to get free ringtones on my iPhone today. I have a jailbroken, unlocked iPhone running firmware version 1.1.3. I am using iTunes 7.4.2.4. I discovered a way to get ringtones on the phone that survived the syncing process. Here's how:

1) Create a ringtone. Here's how in a nutshell: Use audacity to edit a 30 second section of your favorite legal mp3. Create a ringtone mp3 by exporting it out of audacity. Import the mp3 into iTunes. Once imported into iTunes go to preferences/advanced/importing in iTunes select AAC as your preferred method of importing. Go back out to the music view in iTunes. Find the ringtone you just made. Right click on it and select "convert to aac." No go to windows explorer and find your new ringtone, which will be a M4P file, ie "ringtone.m4p". Change the "p" to an "r" so now the file is "ringtone.m4r". "m4r" is the ringtone extension.

2) Upload the ringtone to your iPhone. Here's how in a nutshell: Make sure your iPhone is jailbroken and has Open SSH installed. Use winSCP to connect to the phone. Navigate the iphone window of winSCP to /private/var/Ringtones directory. It may be a different directory for you because I used BossTools to move my ringtones to the other partition. Now just use winSCP to upload the ringtone.

3) Restart your iPhone.

4) No go into settings/sounds and select your ringtone.

That's it! You're done!