PodcastsGallery iPhone Matters
search


How to play background video on the iPhone

Posted March 13, 2009 11:30 AM by Chris Seibold
Categories: Tips and tricks 

Have you ever wanted to play the audio part of a video in the background while you do something else on your iPhone? If you try to pull it off in the most straightforward way possibly you’ll think that you can’t. You could, of course, download the video and pull out the audio and listen to that while doing something else on the iPhone but that would be a real hassle. Are you stuck? Nope, thanks to a mere seven step workaround concocted by Erik Vold. Using Erik’s method doesn’t involve jailbreaking or adding apps just a convoluted sequence of hitting buttons and choosing what built app plays your video. Sure it’s a few steps that shouldn’t be there but now you can listen to the audio portion of videos while doing something else with your iPhone.

Permalink | Email This | Comments (9)

Comments

  1. It would be great if it worked…but it doesn’t for me.  Instead of getting the movie audio, it starts playing one of my songs instead.  A configuration issue, perhaps?  I tried everything I could find and nothing helped…

    Posted by Bruce Dumes on March 13, 2009 12:50 PM

  2. Same thing happened to me…music and not the video.

    Posted by Ken Leebow on March 13, 2009 2:31 PM

  3. @chris thx for mentioning the tip =]

    @bruce & @ken what you guys describe happens on my iPod, but what I describe in my blog post happens on my iPhone. Can you guys let me know what OS version you are running? and confirm that you are using an iPhone, and what generation is it? (I haven’t tired the first generation device).

    Posted by Erik Vold on March 14, 2009 12:12 AM

  4. Is the tip page gone couldn’t find it :(  Weird

    Posted by Khangs on March 14, 2009 1:24 AM

  5. I’ve got a 3G jailbroken 2.2.1 iPhone.  If the tip page is gone, I’ll try to summarize:

    1) start playing a movie
    2) press the home key once
    3) turn screen off
    4) double-click home button
    5) click play button
    6) with any luck, the audio from your movie will be playing (except in my case, it picks a random audio file)
    7) slide to unlock your phone and have a nice day

    Posted by Bruce Dumes on March 14, 2009 10:00 AM

  6. Ahh, you guys are correct.

    I always perform this task on video podcasts, which I watch from the ‘podcast’ section of the ‘iPod’ app on the iPhone. So my tip works for that, but not for watching videos in the ‘video’ section of the ‘iPod’ app of the iPhone.

    Also I’m trying everything I know and I can’t get that to work, so wtf apple? that is a massive FLAW.

    I’ll correct my post soon, thx everyone for the info.

    Posted by Erik Vold on March 14, 2009 4:41 PM

  7. If your offer is true then i am first it need i also want to play back ground music at my iphone.
    mp3 music store

    Posted by mp3 music store on March 20, 2009 4:07 AM

  8. The first thing I did was grab the takes I wanted and arranged them in iMovie. I cut out the sections of the video where I fumbled around or took too long to do something, and just generally tried to say what I wanted to say in as little time as possible. My goal was to cut down to 3:00 minutes. I ended up at 3:13.Once I had the video cut down with the proper timing, it was time to add the background music. This is why I turned it off in the game. If I had left it on, when I cut a second or two out of the video here and there, the music would skip. So now I grabbed the raw audio file from my computer and loaded it in as background music. Sweet.Now for the hard part: the voice-over work. I hooked my mic up to my Mac Book and started recording. My first instinct was to try to do the whole thing in one go, but this turned out to be a bad idea. Instead it was better to break it up into chunks. Every time it was my instinct to pause, I’d stop recording. That way I had more control over re-recording chunks when I’d misspeak (which was frequently). It took me about 3 hrs to record (and re-record) all the voice-over audio to the point where I was happy with it…!!

    Posted by Condos Toronto on March 20, 2009 4:50 AM

  9. I busted out my handy video camera (I’m glad I went through that stage of my life where I was directing short films), my tripod, my shotgun mic, my iPod touch, and my male-to-male 3.5mm headphone cable.

    I cleared off a space on my desk. My desk is a nearly black wood, so it provided a nice non-distracting background for the shoot. I tried a few different lighting tests:

      * Darkening the room and exposing the camera so that only the screen was visible
      * Brightening the room so that the screen wasn’t as bright
      * Half-way in between

    I was most happy with the half-way solution. I brightened up the room a bit, but manually exposed the Condos Toronto so that the screen still looked nice and bright. I liked that I could see my hands in the shot, it looked more “human” or just nicer somehow.

    I set the camera up on the tripod with it pointing down towards the desk at about a 45 degree angle. I held the iPod where I wanted it and I manually focused the camera. This would stop it from losing focus if the lighting changed slightly or I moved the iPod momentarily out of the camera’s auto-focus zone. Then I adjusted the white balance: it turns out the iPod’s screen is very close to daylight temperature.

    Posted by Condos Toronto on March 20, 2009 4:51 AM

Submit Comments

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
Forums | About | Contact | Press | Privacy

©2007 sterndesign, LLC. All rights reserved. All trademarks and copyrights remain the property of their respective owners. Proudly powered by ExpressionEngine. Dedicated hosting by pMachine Hosting