Chapter 24. Exploring the Supported Media Type
In This Chapter
| Audio and video formats that the iPhone OS supports |
| Limitations in audio playback of compressed versus uncompressed audio |
At its heart, the iPhone is a sophisticated media device. It is, at the end of the day, an iPod as well as a phone. It can play a variety of audio and video formats and contains ample storage for this media. In the upcoming chapters, I'm going to discuss how you play audio and video files, but before that I'll discuss the types of formats the iPhone is capable of playing and the limitations involved.
Supported Audio Formats
The first iPod shipped in 2001 and had a 5GB hard disk, which enabled it to store 1,000 songs. Today, over 175 million iPods have shipped, with the largest among them storing 160GB of data. The iPhone is more than just an iPod, but it can thank its predecessors for its amazing support for audio formats.
Compressed audio
When it comes to compressed audio, the iPhone OS utilizes a hardware codec for playback. This means that it is only capable of playing one such sound at a time. This makes these formats suitable for "long play" types of applications, where your audio is playing for a lengthy period of time, perhaps the duration of your application runtime. It does not, however, make it possible to mix sounds together. To do this, you must use an audio format that is played using a software codec.
The audio formats that are played with a hardware codec are AAC, ALAC (Apple Lossless), and ...