[iCapture]

I downloaded a ski movie called "Seven Sunny Days"

Well, when I converted it from avi to mp4 format it seems that the quality has been significantly reduced.

Is this because of my iPhone, because of the program im using, or is mp4 a lower quality format???

Just curious because the movie isn't as amazing with the lower resolution.

[mduell]

Converting video always lowers the quality. How much depends on the quality of the source movie (poor quality movies look much worse after reencoding as the new codec tries to copy all the mistakes in the source) and the encoding setting you used.

How good is the source and what encoding setting did you use? I've had good experiences with high quality sources (DVD) and the higher iPhone/iPod settings in VisualHub.

[gradient]

iSquint is perfectly capable of nice looking conversions for your iPhone - it's the only program I currently use for that task. Where did you have the quality slider set? If you have it towards the left of center then, yes you'll for sure notice the degradation. Don't do that unless you absolutely need the file to be small. I usually keep the quality on High (the best setting being Go Nuts but the file size ends up being a little too big for me).

Like every encoding program, it's a balance between how good you want it to look and how small you need the file to be.