Degraded Quality of 720p Videos Uploaded with iPhone Facebook App
With the release of Apple’s new iPhone 4 and Facebook’s updated app that lets you upload videos from your phone, many more people will have the ability to record and upload high-definition 720p videos to Facebook. However, there are many ways to upload a video to Facebook and they do not all produce the same results.
After recording an event with the iPhone 4 you are left with a 720p video. There are many ways to upload the video but the two quickest ways to do so from your iPhone are the following:
1. If you go into the Facebook app and upload this video, the iPhone will compress it and then send it to Facebook. Once Facebook receives it, it thinks it’s an HD video and so it designates it as such (appends “[HD]” to the title and lets you choose HD quality in the player).
2. You can also send this video to yourself via email (the iPhone will compress it and attach it to the email). Once you receive the email, the attached video will have been down converted to 568×320. You can then download this attachment and then use the Facebook app to upload it. Facebook will then see that the video is not HD but it is high quality and thus will give it the HQ designation (appends “[HQ]” to the title and lets you choose HQ quality in the player).
Everything so far looks good except that normally an HD video should look better than an HQ video. Well therein lies the problem. It does not turn out this way. The HD video actually looks worse than the HQ video on Facebook.
This then begs the question as to what exactly the Facebook app is doing with the video that causes the HD video to be compressed a lot more than the HQ video?
Now if you take the longer route and sync your iPhone videos to your computer and then upload it to Facebook using your computer, the video will not be compressed into oblivion. Instead it will be designated HD and look a lot better than HQ.
Hopefully, Facebook will fix this issue since it is very annoying. It almost punishes you for having a phone that can record HD videos.
By the way, this whole article was created using my iPhone 4 
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