Quicktime settings for Mac + PC?
 

I have a short sequence in Final Cut Express HD that I need to put on a CD so it can played on a PC laptop. I exported it to Quicktime but I used H.264 (it was the default, and I haven't heard of the others) and it won't play on the PC. What encoder is the one to use for universal compatibility (quality would be good too)? I'd be happy to experiment but I don't have a PC to test the various encodings on and I'm kind of running out of time on this one.

FWIW, it's an ~5 minute clip. I was able to export it for the web successfully, also.

Thanks!

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/preview/

you can just download QT 7 for the PC instead of re-compressing. or you can re-compress--having researched this a bit (thanks again, dave!), sorenson 3 or mp4 seems to be able to reach most viewers in the most backwardly compatible way, if you decide you need to re-compress.

only a few PC techno-geeks seem to have QT 7 access, to date....

personally, having experimented, i still think QT 7 H.264 is way better than some of those other hunka-junk formats...it compresses tighter, runs more smoothly. the drawback is it is not a standard yet.

Justin,
Maryem is correct. Export use "MPEG4-Video" or Sorenson 3. You can save yourself some headaches by first selecting the preset LAN/Intranet and then click the Options and then the Video buttons to get at where you can change the Compression type.

As far as terminology goes, H.264 is a standard but what Maryem meant was that it isn't widely adopted yet. It will improve greatly when QT 7 for Windows comes out. It provides superb results.

Thanks guys! It's a long story, but basically when I get to where the laptop is, there is no internet access, and since it's a hospital room I don't wanna be messing around with the computer. So it has to play in QT6. For some reason I thought H.264 would play on that but who knows why I thought that.

The H.264-encoded video does look superb on my Mac though... :)

Anyway, thanks again. My grandfather will appreciate it!

justin, the last time i looked, qt 7 beta for the pc was released weeks ago... so you should be able to download it without installing it, and burn the install to a cd, so that it could be installed on his laptop on location.

h.264 is so much better than the other qt codecs that it's worth investigating... the only downside is that h.264 has greater overhead than other pc codecs of comparable quality, so if his laptop is really old, there could be an issue there... you also might have to copy the video file off to his local hard drive to get it to play back fast enuf.