Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with video and quicktime

I need an automated way to convert MKV to MP4 on Mac OS X

joshrholloway — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:00:41 -0800

I am trying to build an automated solution to convert MKV files to MP4 without re-encoding on Mac OS X, using AppleScript, Automator, etc. and I need help! Multiple times a day I get MKV container files that I need to convert to MP4 files. There is a great application for Windows called XenonMKV that can extract the individual components out of an MKV container and re-assemble them as an MP4. It does this process without re-encoding the video, which saves tons of time. A process that would normally take an hour or two can be done in three to five minutes with XenonMKV.

Unfortunately, there is apparently nothing like this application for OS X. There is, however, a little trick you can pull off using QuickTime 7 Pro and Perian. Perian will let you open MKV files with QuickTime, which you can't normally do, and you can use the Pass Through option during export from QuickTime which achieves basically the same effect as XenonMKV.

So now that I know this process is possible, and since I have to do it multiple times a day, I want to try to automate it. It's pretty easy to slap together an AppleScript that can take a video file as input and then export it, but there are two hitches:

1. QuickTime Pro needs to use the specific Pass Through export settings no matter what the last export settings used were.

2. When you open an MKV file in QuickTime, the entire video must be indexed fully before you can run an export. This can take anywhere from a minute to three minutes or so, depending on the length and file size of the video.

The second problem seems to be the biggest because it doesn't appear there's any way to tell QuickTime to wait until a video is indexed before running a command. The best I could come up with was to parse the file size and then tell QuickTime to wait for a certain amount of time that's really just a best guess of how long it will take to index the video file based on its size. This is really not a good solution, because I'd like to share this with other people who might not have a system as fast as mine, and the numbers may be off.

So does anyone have any ideas on how I could make this process work? Ideally I'd like to see the final form as a standalone .app that can be used as a droplet and do everything automatically without any input from the user. Any help at all would be appreciated.

Flash CS4 Quicktime Export leaves artifacts and looks like crud. Help!

buriednexttoyou — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:03:30 -0800

Flash animators: When I export my flash cartoon to quicktime, moving objects leave behind horrible artifacts. Apparently I am not the only one with this problem. If Flash's quicktime export is so crummy, how do the professionals publish their cartoons to video? I'm working with CS4 on a mac, but I've heard this is also a problem with CS3. I've also heard that you can import SWF files into After Effects and then export to video. As much as I'd like to be able to afford AE, I can't at the moment.

I know there are tons of animators working in Flash. Does this problem exist for you, and how do you deal with it?

Please Help Me eMail my Videos via OSX Mail

konig — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:59:28 -0800

I want to send YouTube and other videos via email after I've download them. I am using OSX 10.5.6 and v3.5 Mail. I have a QT Pro license, so I can convert the format once the video is downloaded. I would like for friends who use PCs and those who use Macs to be able to play the videos. My questions are:

1) In what format should the video be when I send it, so that users of both platforms are able to enjoy the video?

2) If a PC user tells me that they cannot view the video, what application should I advise they obtain in order to do so. (I am not going to try to troubleshoot their PC, I just want to tell them that they need "X" program in order to play the movie.)

3) Is there any other info that I need to be aware of, from your experience, to do this as seamlessly as possible?

I have done a lot of searching for these answers and cannot seem to find them. I sincerely appreciate your assistance in advance!

High quality video with small file sizes.

phaedon — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:21:17 -0800

Compressing quicktime movies for the internets. I'm in a new position where I have to prep a lot of video content for the web. I'm looking to maximize quality and resolution while keeping file size as practical as possible (my target audience does not include high-end users with blazing connections). Looking at the trailers that Apple throws up makes me feel my work has something left to be desired... are there any tutorials available on how to prep content for the web using Quicktime, Final Cut, or Compressor? I feel like I have a rudimentary knowledge of how this works but I am left wondering if there are any cool tricks or advanced tips.

legal video conversion

roue — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:32:10 -0800

I'd like to legally automate the conversion of quicktime .mov files videos to .flv, providing a drop box service, preferably under linux, but I'm getting tripped up on the first and last parts My users are requesting a simple video ingestion/conversion service and they don't want to use YouTube in an attempt to maintain control of their content.

There are plenty of tools that will take video file format x, y, and z and convert them to H.263/Sorensen Spark/H.264 .flv files. The obvious choices are ffmpeg / mencoder / vlc project libs. Unfortunately, to accomplish the conversion they have reverse engineered U.S. patent restricted commercial codecs (please correct me if I'm wrong). Since I'll be doing this in a professional capacity, I'd like it to be completely in compliance with the law.

So I guess my question is three fold:

1. What's the cheapest way I can legally do quicktime to flv conversion?

2. If I've got a choice, what's the best codec to use for web distribution?

3. What automatable software would you recommend?

We can probably afford to spend some money, but not, for instance, the $3000 On2 wants for it's conversion tools. Also, we have Adobe CS3 Flash and Flash Video Encoder, but I was unable to find a way to script them (on Mac) to do a conversion. Last, if at all possible I'd like to avoid really hacky solutions like "this cool app that records mouse movments and lets you play them back..."

Thanks.

Video to Images

rocco — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 13:50:18 -0800

I need to convert a Quicktime movie to one single JPEG image that contains every frame of the movie. So you'd see each frame as a tiny image and there'd be thousands of little images in this one JPEG. I've done this before, and I have the image, but I just cannot find it again! This would be for the mac. Thanks

Good Flash player for playing Quicktime (.mov) files?

mark7570 — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:28:25 -0800

Good off-the-shelf Flash player to play Quicktime (.mov) files? Or get one custom-built? I have videos of a recent event, all in Quicktime .mov format, nicely edited. I want to post them online, on a site that I host myself.

Problem, of course, is that lots of users don't have Quicktime installed, and/or the default Quicktime player isn't very friendly (starts and stops as things are buffering).

So I want to use a Flash player (like every other site with video does) to allow users a more convenient way to play the files.

The off-the-shelf Flash players I've found so far either gak on something in the format - they can't play my edited .mov file - or they degrade the quality significantly - or the UI is horrible.

Commercial video-site players, embeddable things like the Revver player, look much better, but they throw ads into the mix. I don't want ads. I'm hosting the files and am willing to pay to own the flash player.

So: is there a good off-the-shelf solution I'm missing, or is this a case where I should go out and get someone to custom-code a decent Flash player (and if so, where do I find that person)?

P.S. Yes, I've read this 2005 post about encoding Web video - figuring things have developed in the ensuing 3 years.

Any camcorders with mic input and easy digital recording format?

wuntu — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 16:12:22 -0800

What currently available video cameras will record to a commonly viewable digital format (ie. something Quicktime supports with no additional add-ons) AND has a microphone input jack? I'm in search of a video camera that will allow professors to record their lectures. I'm looking for a camera that will:
- store video in a format that can be copied to a computer quickly (so Flash Card or Hard Drive based)
- produce video in a format that can be played on most people's computers with software they already have installed (ie. Quicktime)
- in a format that isn't huge (likely some form of MPEG4)
- has a microphone input jack for attaching an external microphone (this is a must as the speaker will potentially be a significant from the camera.)
- easy to use. ideally there would be an automatic mode so that the person setting it up can just turn it on and press record, then drag a file to a file server for distribution.

It looks like the Sanyo Xacti HD2 fits the bill, but I believe it has been discontinued. Sanyo's newer models appear to record in AVCHD. I tried a Canon HF10, which also records in AVCHD format. The raw files will not play in Quicktime, and importing them through iMovie takes longer than real time (on a MacBook Pro).

VLC seems to be working on support for AVCHD, but unfortunately, I don't think it is ready for general use, and most student computers still don't have VLC installed.

The Focus Enhancements Fire Store products look promising as well. However, it would significantly increase the price of the system and I believe one of our professors previously used one and still needed assistance getting it set up.

Anything else is out there that might work?

QuickTime? Flash? Who's talking about it?

dpcoffin — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:52:21 -0800

Videos in pdfs: Stick with QuickTime, or switch to Flash? I've been producing rich media pdfs for multi-platform CD delivery for some time now, using video clips in Quicktime format, made with FCPro and Sorenson Squeeze. Should I switch to using Flash video now that Acrobat 9, with its native support for Adobe Flash, is here, since it's supposedly far more widely distributed than QT? IS this a game-changer? Advantages? Disadvantages? Where else might I go to stimulate some discussion of the pros and cons of this new option? (Already posted at Adobe forums; no responses so far; I'm unaware of any active multimedia-in-pdf forums…)

Appreciate any comments, opinions, predictions, guesses; thanks!

Give me my old Final Cut Express!

pzarquon — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:13:23 -0800

How do I get Final Cut Express to export straightforward 1280x720 HD videos from my Sanyo Xacti HD700... like it used to? I have a Sanyo Xacti HD700. It gives me 1280x720 MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 files, which my Mac just loves. I used to be able to quickly edit the clips together in Final Cut Express, export using complementary QuickTime settings (specifically, those recommended by Vimeo for HD playback), and get beautiful MP4 files, relatively quickly.

Then, one day, a friend needed me to edit a quick video using a DV camcorder. It was confusing as heck getting the footage into FCE, and not particularly elegant getting it out. But, the project was done overnight, I washed my hands of it, and wanted to get back to making beautiful MP4 files again, relatively quickly.

Except I can't! Now, for one, encoding takes hours. Hours! My source videos and export videos are very similar, yet I sit and watch as the estimate for completion actually goes up for an hour before slowly coming back down.

And frankly, that would be fine, except now my exported videos are the wrong size. They include letterboxes, and the video itself is squished, stretched. So I wait four times as long for a ghastly video. The best I could do is use the Quicktime export settings to "crop off" the letterboxing, but there's still some black bars and it's just not the same.

Here's how my videos used to look. Here's how an exported video looks now. What happened? Out of the box, everything worked perfectly. Now, tainted with actual tape, Final Cut Express seems like it's running my videos through six extra wringers and giving me clips worse than I'd get just cut-and-paste editing the Xacti files in QuickTime Pro!

I Googled my brains out, and all I've learned is, if I had Final Cut Pro, "Project Settings" would have all the switches I need. Well, I don't have FCP, just FCE.

Somewhere, something was set that I want to unset. Can anyone help? Do I have to delete every trace of FCE and just reinstall?

Editing DIVX directly in iMovie/FCP

unSane — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:46:26 -0800

I've got a VIO POV1 helmetcam which records video as .avi files in DIVX format. What do I need to edit this directly in iMovie and Final Cut Pro? Whenever I've tried to do this kind of thing before (using Flip4Mac as I remember) I've run into issues, for example FCP requiring me to render sound for the clips I drop into the timeline.

I've already tried Flip4Mac, Perian and the regular DIVX/XVID codecs and although some will allow me to play the movies with sound in QT, none of them so far will allow iMovie to recognize the files.

Solution before has been to transcode to DV or some other format using ffmpegx or similar, but the movies are long and this takes up a heck of a lot of disk space and it's slow.

Quicktime says the format is 'XVID', 720 x 480, Millions.

(I'll probably transcode to DV for final editing but I'm looking for a quick and dirty way to edit movies on my laptop to play to a group of riders each day on a trip to Moab).

Seeking OS X media player with specific features

chudmonkey — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:26:04 -0800

What video/media player do you use in OS X? Can you recommend one that has some specific features (listed inside)? I've asked basically this same question before, but that was a few years ago and I'm hoping something has changed since then.

I really, really want a Leopard-compatible player with ALL of these features:

-"Always on Top" playing
-Variable-speed playback, preferably with automatic audio pitch-shifting, preferably with a control that shows precisely what % of normal speed is being played.
-Frame-by-frame playback.

I currently have the following installed:

VLC 0.8.6f - No variable-speed playback, no frame-by-frame.
Mplayer 1.0 rc2 - No VSP, no frame-by-frame, no "on top"
Quicktime 7.2.1 - VSP is via an imprecise slider and pitch-shift is not automatic.

MPlayer is actually my favourite, despite having none of my desired features. I like the way it looks. Quicktime is my least-favourite, despite having nearly all the features. It's better now than it ever was, so I'm really just clinging to a bias. The VSP system is shoddy, however.

I'm open to any suggestions you can make, or corrections of my above impressions. I know MPlayer is open-source as has been released in multiple flavours, but I haven't found one with variable-speed playback yet.

Thanks in advance!

Help me fix the aspect ratio on this .MOV!

Faint of Butt — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:21:28 -0800

Help me fix the aspect ratio of this .MOV video, please! It's an emergency! Okay, I've got a .MOV here, right? It's supposed to be in 4:3 aspect ratio. The problem is that the file is in 4:3, but the video is in widescreen, and it's all squashed short and fat, with black letterbox bars on the top and bottom! I need to fix this and get it up on YouTube right now, but I know next to nothing about video editing. What free software can I use to fix this quickly? If there are any volunteers, I can also e-mail it someone who can fix it and e-mail it back. Thank you, AskMe!

Broken Quicktime files make ASoze something something...

ASoze — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 13:11:16 -0800

Quicktime files recorded with OnLocation CS3. Some work, but most don't. The file size is appropriate for their length, so I'm really hoping that there's About a month ago, I streamed a couple days worth of interviews from an HVX-200 to my laptop hard drive via OnLocation. (I've done this 100x and never had a problem, it bears mentioning..) This time, however, a decent percentage of the files are unreadable by QuickTime, Final Cut, Premiere, etc..

I would've written these off as lost to the winds, but a few of them still have viewable video and audio, provided they are opened in OnLocation. Anyone have ideas to salvage any of this video? (Also, it seems as though only the files that were larger than 2GB have problems.) But the drive I recorded to was NTFS, and I have recorded large files prior to this. (I think...)

Addendum - I'm also willing to pay to have the files reconstructed, if I could just find someone skilled in this work. (It isn't exactly data recovery, because the files are intact.) I suspect that someone with intimate knowledge of QT, a hex editor, and a hundred years could do some real good with these files.)

Censoring Aduio in Quicktime

Smarson — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 10:54:26 -0800

How can I censor the audio in an .avi file using Quicktime Pro? I've got this hilarious video of my wedding reception "after party." It's comedic gold and I wanted to post it online for some other friends and family to see except that in two separate sections someone says something totally inappropriate. Thus I just need to either cut the audio at those two points (for like 2 seconds each) or dub it over with a censoring *BEEP* (which might actually be funnier). Using Quicktime Pro I've figured out how to overlay the current audio with other audio (i.e. inserting a soundtrack), but this doesn't actually remove what was said and it can still be heard over the insert. Can what I want to do be accomplished with QT Pro?

Video was shot as .avi.

Why can't I change pixel size / resolution in Adobe Premiere?

Flying Saucer — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:24:25 -0800

When I change the pixel size in Adobe Premiere Pro...why doesn't it change? I'm editing DV footage with a partner. He's got an Apple and FCP; I've got a PC and Adobe Premiere 6.0.

Somewhere along the way we realized that my videos, output as 720x480, show up on Quicktime (on both machines) as 640x480.

Premiere seems to have three settings that relate to pixel size:

- The presets, which you select when you start a new project. One of them is "720x480 NTSC for Quicktime," which STILL turns my videos into 640x480 when played on QT.

- Clip > Advanced Options > Pixel Aspect Ratio, which doesn't seem to do anything.

- The Pixel Aspect Ratio menu under Project > Project Settings > Video, which also has no effect.

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? Is it something I failed to do during capture, forever dooming this footage to black margins when they're played on a Mac?

I've looked all over the web and Adobe's instructions and can't find a solution. Thanks for any suggestions.

The vistas Vista hides

@homer — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 19:16:58 -0800

Is there any any way to play Diggnation videos in Vista with Quicktime so flaky? It's a pretty specific request but Diggnation is all I really care about watching under Vista at the moment. In my Google searches it looks like Quicktime itself is not entirely functional under Vista. If anyone has something to try I'm all eyes.

Where can I find best practices/recommendations/accessibility guidelines for video content?

cadge — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 15:07:46 -0800

I'm building a website that will offer some video content. Where can I find best practices/recommendations/accessibility guidelines for video content? I'm building a website that will offer primarily text/image content. Mr. Client wants to add some video clips to support the content. Mr. Client also wants my advice on producing this video content (what format, etc.).

[About this project: The site will be part of a university's website, and the content is intended for educators, especially K-12 instructors. It does not get heavy traffic. The video content will be downloadable, not streaming - at least for now.]

I don't have much multimedia experience, and I'm not even sure where to begin researching this. I tried Google and found scattered guidelines sites, but nothing that seemed like a definite authority.

Is there a site where I can find best practices, recommendations, and/or accessibility guidelines for offering video content online? Here are some of the questions I want to be able to answer:

* What format? Would it be OK to offer video in just Quicktime, or should we also offer various Windows formats?

* Should we display the video files inline on the page? Or should the user click to view them in a popup, so that no file conflict would interfere with the page loading (or am I talking total nonsense here)?

* Recommendations for lo-rez/hi-rez rates? And good ways to display this choice - would this lead to popups like I mentioned above?

* Compression rates? Other stats I don't know anything about but should?

* Optimal file sizes?

* Accessibility concerns? I would like to encourage them to be mindful of accessibility and do things like captioning, but it is a very small department with one person working on the content when he can.

Huuuuuuge thanks to anyone who can offer advice on this!

Saving streaming video on a Mac

Dasein — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:08:22 -0800

How can I record video streams from RealPlayer and Quicktime on a Mac? I am on a MacBook Pro. I would like to record some video streams that are running in RealPlayer and Quicktime. The ultimate aim is to post these videos on youtube. I have no idea how to do this, but would like to be able to do it without spending money (for instance, buying Quicktime Pro). I'm particularly keen on recording the Real video streams, in case there is a solution that would apply there but not in Quicktime.

Is this possible? Help is greatly appreciated.

How can I tell how many of my website's users have Quicktime 7 installed?

tweebiscuit — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 16:05:11 -0800

How can I tell how many of my website's users have Quicktime 7 installed? I run a relatively popular, regularly updated video website, which serves both to casual internet users and to a large podcast audience. I want to switch to the H.264 codec, for its far superior quality and iPod compatibility, but it requires Quicktime 7 (as opposed to Quicktime 6) to play back. (I'm currently compressing to MPEG-4, because I got sick of making separate H264 and Sorenson encodes.)

However, I'm going to need some numbers before I can force them all to upgrade. General statistics about the internet-using population at large aren't helpful, as our audience is relatively young -- I'd wager that most of them are iTunes users, for example, and as Quicktime 7 is part of iTunes 6, I think our demographics are going to skew towards having it installed. However, I still need to know for sure.

So, is there a test I can run that will provide me with statistics of how many users use Quicktime 7, a la browser user statistics? A piece of Javascript on my front page, for example?

Best Codec for Youtube Videos?

sswiller — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 08:18:54 -0800

What is the optimal Quicktime Codec to use when compressing Quicktime movies for You Tube? I use Sorenson3 encoding because I'm told that this is best for the web, but I wonder if this holds true for Quicktime files that have been uploaded to Youtube or Myspace or Google Videos and converted to Flash. Also, do certain types of content hold up better with one type of codec rather than another? For example, shooting an outdoor basketball game verses an indoor wedding.

QuickTime very, very unhappy

NinjaTadpole — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 05:50:58 -0800

QuickTime, (and QuickTimeAlternative) can't play sound correctly and hangs after any interaction. It started after downloading the QT8 plus iTunes bundle a month or so ago and I've never been able to sort it out since.
The video will play correctly if no controls are used, but the sound will either be the first 1/10 second repeated or silence. If using the controls at all (such as reducing the volume) the video hangs for 30 seconds or so before resuming. At no point will the sound play correctly.

I've uninstalled and re-installed both pieces of software and only had one installed at a time. I use Windows 2000.

So what's got stuck and choked my machine? How do I set the QT free?

simple images-to-video converter for mac/unix?

sergeant sandwich — Sat, 04 Mar 2006 13:19:55 -0800

can anyone recommend a simple piece of Mac (or unix) software that will take a bunch of image files named abc001, abc002, etc and string them together into a video file that i can view with a lowest-common-denominator video player? i have some code that spits out a bunch of images - currently into the simple PPM format that's part of netpbm package. the images have filenames with sequential numbers in them, and i want software that will just string them together in order into one of the more common (mpeg, avi, quicktime, or whatever) video formats.

i was planning to use ppmtompeg that comes with netpbm but i'm having a hard time getting the netpbm package to compile on my powerbook. while i try to sort that out, i'm wondering if there's any other software available to do what i want?

i see from this thread that apparently quicktime will do this, but i suspect i need the quicktime pro that you have to pay for, as opposed to the free quicktime player.

so, my only absolute requirement be that the software is free. it would be nice if it supported the PPM format (if not, i can batch-convert my images in graphic converter) and extra nice if i could run it from the command line like ppmtompeg so that i can incorporate the conversion into a shell script.

any ideas? thanks in advance!

fly-by video search

icetaco — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:11:33 -0800

Can anyone point me to hi resolution fly-by videos in quicktime? I'm looking for nature-scenery-lanscape flying, but google is not being responsive.

What's the best way to swap embedded Quicktime movies on a web page?

tweebiscuit — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 09:42:42 -0800

What's the most effective and broadly compatible way to swap embedded Quicktime movies on a web page? I've written my own JavaScript to do so, but it doesn't work on certain (a minority of) browsers, and it's a bit slow. Does anyone have experience doing this? See my first attempt here. When the page is loaded for the first time, the banana should be shown. When a button is clicked, the video in question should start playing. When the other button is clicked, the first video should be replaced by the second, which should start playing from the beginning. This works on most browsers, but doesn't work on at least Safari 1.0 (though Safari 2) is fine. I'm not worried about IE5 and the like, but using Javascript and Quicktime is so complicated that I need to be confident that I'm using a method that will work crossbrowser.

What my current script does (it's easy to read in the source if you want to):
1) The DIV that the Quicktime embed is in starts with its CSS visibility set to hidden. When a link is clicked, it's set to "visible".
2) Using the SetURL method recommended by Apple in the Javascript Scripting Guide to Quicktime, the URL of the embed is changed to the new video's URL.

Unfortunately, some browsers are happier about doing this than others -- until I added some delays, I had reports that on some computers running IE6 (but not all), the video stage would appear but not change URLs, which suggested to me that the script was getting ahead of itself, but I added some delays. Still, Safari 1.0 doesn't seem to respond to SetURL() at all (speaking of which, is there somewhere I can find a copy of Safari 1.0 that will run under Tiger?), and the delay is still really just a kludge.

Anyone have an ideas for a better and more reliable way to do this that wouldn't require changing layout of the page? (I'm committed to having that video area swap in and out.) I'd much appreciate it -- thanks!