Almost every earphone recommendation is written for music. Watching vertical video is a different job with different failure modes, and the usual advice — buy the most detailed thing in your budget — is close to backwards here.

Three criteria matter, in this order.

1. Latency, and why lip-sync is the first thing you notice

Bluetooth audio is not instant. The signal has to be encoded, transmitted, buffered and decoded, and that takes long enough to see.

Published figures for the common codecs:

Codec	Typical latency	Usable for video?
SBC	~200–220 ms	Poor — visibly out of sync
AAC	~150–250 ms	Poor to marginal, and variable
aptX	~100–170 ms	Better, still above the comfortable threshold
aptX Low Latency	~32–40 ms	Yes — designed for exactly this
Wired	Effectively zero	Yes

The threshold that matters: delay at or below about 45 ms is generally imperceptible. Everything above it is a judgement call about how much mismatch you tolerate.

Two caveats worth knowing, because they explain why your experience may not match the table:

• Both ends must support the same codec. aptX Low Latency on the earphones does nothing if the phone will not negotiate it.
• Modern video apps compensate. Players commonly delay the video slightly to match a known audio delay. This works well when the delay is stable and predictable, which is why streaming video often feels fine on Bluetooth while games and live calls do not.

That compensation is also why the problem shows up unevenly: a scrolling feed that starts and stops playback constantly gives the compensation less to work with than a single long video does.

2. Tuning: forgiving beats revealing

This is where the standard advice inverts.

As the piece on the encoding chain sets out, platform audio has usually been through three lossy encoders by the time it reaches you, and it arrives at around 128 kbps AAC. A revealing earphone shows you exactly what those encoders did. A warm one hides it.

For video specifically, you want:

• A soft, unfussy treble. Codec artefacts live up there. A rolled-off top end conceals them.
• Solid mid-bass. Most short-form audio is voice, and voice presence lives in the lower mids. Thin bass makes compressed speech sound hollow and tiring.
• Coherence over resolution. A single well-tuned dynamic driver usually beats a multi-driver arrangement here, because you are not trying to resolve a mix — you are trying to make one voice and one music bed sit together.

The Munitio NINES score only 6.2 out of 10 for sound on music, and much of that penalty is “sub-par clarity” and an “overly soft and wooly” top end. For scrolling video, those are close to the ideal characteristics. It is a genuine case where a mediocre music earphone is a good video earphone.

That is not an argument to go and buy them. It is an argument that the review score you are reading was measured against a different task than the one you are performing.

3. Practicality

The unglamorous criteria that decide whether you actually use them:

• Single-earbud use. Half of vertical-video watching happens in situations where you want one ear open.
• Fast, reliable reconnection. You will be putting these in and taking them out constantly.
• A physical pause control. Touch controls on a phone screen you are already scrolling are a bad combination.
• Case-free tolerance. Wired sets and neckbands win here for anyone who does not want to manage a charging case.

The wired argument

If you can use a wire, use a wire. It wins on every criterion at once:

• Zero latency. No codec negotiation, no compensation, nothing to go wrong.
• One fewer lossy encode. It removes stage four from the chain entirely.
• No battery, no pairing, no case.
• Cheaper for equivalent sound, because you are not paying for radio, battery and enclosure.

The obvious objection is that most phones no longer have a jack. A USB-C or Lightning dongle costs very little and solves it, at the price of a dangling adapter. Whether that is acceptable is a question about your pockets, not about audio.

What to actually look for

Rather than a model list that will be out of date in a year, the specification to shop against:

If buying wireless: confirm aptX Low Latency support on both your phone and the earphones, or accept that you are relying on app-side compensation. Prioritise a warm tuning and single-earbud use. Ignore driver counts.

If buying wired: almost any competently tuned single-dynamic-driver earphone will do, and your money is better spent on getting the seal right — the fit guide — than on moving up a price tier.

In both cases: be sceptical of “for gaming” marketing on Bluetooth products that do not name a specific low-latency codec. Low latency is a codec property, not an adjective.

The uncomfortable conclusion

For watching short-form video, the earphone matters less than almost anything else in the chain. The platform’s encoder, your seal, and whether you are on a wire all have larger effects.

Which means the honest recommendation is a cheap, warm, wired earphone with tips that seal properly — and spending the difference on nothing at all.