My wife has an iPhone. I have a Samsung S23. Why do videos she texts me look like super low res shit?? Can iPhones not text videos?

Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 136 points –

Edit: NOTE, I am the receiver of the texts.

So many people asking me to have my wife do something different on her end.

Beloved, she is on iPhone because she doesn't want to do anything "weird." She is texting from her phone number using her texting app. That's what's going to happen.

Now, why can't I get iMessage on my android phone? If it's just a messenger app why not make it available for Android?

I'd use it.

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they use proprietary file formats (MOV and HEIC) that need to be converted to a universal format like jpg or MP4 to be viewed on android (I think this can be changed in iPhone settings), and the conversion looks like shit

It’s very funny you say MOV and HEIC are proprietary and then list MP4 considering

  • HEIC is just H.265, the video codec, used to encode images
  • H.264, the codec used for most mp4 files has the same license as H.265 with patent bullshit license fees going on
  • MP4 container is pretty similar to MOV, and is also not an open standard
  • this also means MOV and MP4 can be losslessly converted
  • Apple provides documentation for MOV format free of charge while ISO really wants you to pay to get official standard PDF
  • All this doesn’t matter anyway because ffmpeg can decode everything (though I guess it might matter in bizarro land where software patents are a thing)

Also Android can totally read at least HEIC images. Not sure about MOV. Any of this is also not related to the problem the OP has.

HEIC is not proprietary to Apple at all, they were just one of the early adopters of it.

My Android phone takes pictures in HEIC/HEIF by default, and it's not nearly as much of a problem anymore almost all software can handle the format now.