H.264 and Quicktime 7

[stshipley]

All,

Apple has made much hoopla over the fact the Quicktime 7 does the vaunted H.264 codec. I've been using ffmpegX do squeeze things down with H.264, which makes for better file sizes/quality than Xvid and Divx. These H.264 avi files play fine in VLC and Mplayer . . . . and they don't in Quicktime 7.

I have a feeling that this is because the H.264 file is in an avi container, and Quicktime 7 wants it in an mov container. So are there any plans to get ffmpegX to put H.264 in an mov container, or is there a bug with QT7?

Can anyone shed any light on this quandry?

Thanks,

-STS

[major]

Indeed, Quicktime 7 only supports H264 in MOV/MP4 containers, while mencoder engine only supports it in AVI containers. In subsequent versions it will be possible to overcome this barrier.

[m477]

Something to try in the meantime (no guarantees that this would work):

Set the audio and video codecs to Passthrough, and save the result as a .mov file.

If that just creates another .avi file, you could try the ffmpeg binary to copy the streams from the .avi file into a new .mov file, like so:

/Applications/ffmpegX.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg -i (input file).avi -vcodec copy -acodec copy (output file).mov

Edit: that is, you would do this process on the .avi file generated by ffmpegX.

Matt

[major]

No, it would not work. The muxer currently doesn't support h264 in mov.

[garymm]

Is there any way to get a DVD into QuickTime 7 for encoding to H.264?
I have the MPEG-2 component, but it doesn't seem to be opening the .vob files or the demuxed .m2v files.

[adcvideo]

You can try MPEG Streamclip. The export to Quicktime function of MPEG Streamclip will encode with H.264 as a MOV file.

This requires Quicktime Pro.

[garymm]

Thank you, I will give it a try.