Encoding to HD.mov for Mac

[babalukas]

Although I am a PC user I want to give an HD video to a friend that only uses a Mac. I captured HD to my PC with a SONY camera. The resulting file is a 15GB .mpg. I can easily make a DVD of that and I already did, but I wanted to give it in HD format. Sorenson Squeeze trial crashes on me and so does Canopus Procoder and I have no idea why but I was not too happy about the huge watermarks anyway.I thought I would try Qt 7, which indeed seemed to be working while transcoding to H264 and completed the job. Only the file stops playing after a while. I tried it on two different computers and the resulting file was the same on both. The reported length of the transcoded movie is correct but playback freezes before that, at the exact same point.

Anybody have any advice on what I might be doing wrong? Or any other ideas of how I might give an Apple user some HD material? I also thought of Divx, but I am using Divx 6 and I think Macs are still on 5, and I am not sure that will play.

Transcoding HD is a bitch too! I thought my computers whould be up to the task as they both have high amounts of RAM and Dual Cores etc., but it still takes forever. Even with dual dual cores (if the software can take advantage) the transcoding times would still be very long.

[celtic_druid]

DivX 5.x = ASP MPEG-4 (MPEG-4 part 2), DivX 6 is still just ASP MPEG-4 and therefor 100% backwards compatible.

My advice would be to encode to an AVC mp4 with lc aac audio. Forget about .mov since QT supports mp4.

Use x264 to encode the video, just make sure to not use an HP (High Profile) features since QT only supports upto MP (Main Profile).

For the audio use Nero, faac, iTunes or whatever. Just be sure to use LC aac and not he/aac plus.

Checkout MeGUI.