With the iPhone’s Flash limbo, Posterous finds a workaround for video

The question of whether videos and other media in Adobe’s Flash format will ever be compatible with Apple’s iPhone (and if so, when) has been a neverending source of speculation. While the world waits for a definite answer, other companies are finding workarounds —  YouTube offers a standalone player with videos that have been converted to another format, Adobe vets are developing an iPhone format to compete with Flash, and now there’s blogging-for-the-masses startup Posterous.

One of the cooler things about Posterous (whose goal is to eliminate any of the technical difficulties around blogging) has been the ability to email media to your Posterous account and have it post immediately on your blog. Previously, however, the video and audio published via Posterous couldn’t be viewed on an iPhone, or any other device that didn’t support the Flash Player. That’s particularly unfortunate now, with the new iPhone 3GS’ support for video recording, which co-founder Sachin Agarwal says has dramatically increased the amount of video published via the San Francisco startup. Now, the site converts the video and audio into MP4 files and plays them in Quicktime on the iPhone — which means you can not only send videos from your 3GS, you can watch them on Posterous, too. (They’re still played in Flash when you access Posterous via your desktop computer.)

There aren’t many other sites doing this yet, Agarwal says, because it takes a lot of extra work.

“This is all part of a major push we made to make video on Posterous better, supporting additional codecs (everything from mobile), and increased size and quality,” he says. “For the 3GS, we orient portrait videos correctly, and we always create a player that matches the aspect ratio of the video. Other sites always make a widescreen player, and portrait video looks particularly small/bad.”

Posterous was incubated by Y Combinator and raised a $750,000 seed round last year. Its major competitor is Tumblr.