H.264 to Windows Media Player
 

We have started using H.264. It's awesome. But Quicktime 7 is still beta for Windows and we have to do some delivery to Windows clients who insist on Windows Media Player. I cannot, for the life of me, find a conversion utility that converts H.264 to WM. Compressor is supposed to but I cannot find the Quicktime conversion codec for it on the Apple site.
Any ideas?

I don't have QT 7. But with prior versions, you just export it to the format you want from the QuickTime Pro player. Can't you just export it to an AVI file from the QuickTime Pro player? Or, go to Final Cut and export your final sequence to whatever format you want.

afaik, wmp will not play back h.264 files, so anything that you do in quicktime is not relevant to what the client wants... to put it another way, h.264 video is nowhere near being ready for distribution to the general public, because there aren't any players out there for it... the client is right to insist on windows media... and btw, don't ever transcode from one web format to another, start with the native source format.

if you have access to a pc, you can use the free windows media encoder to create wmv files from a dv source that you exported from your mac... otherwise, you'll have to pay to get that new mac-based encoding software that'll give you two-pass vbr wmv capability... you can't create decent wmv with standard mac software.

finally, not all h.264 is created equal... if you look at the test files in my sig, you'll see that sorenson h.264 does not compare to wmv, real, or nero h.264... i hope to check out the mac h.264 encoder in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback Dan. The reason I need the quickfix is because we are talking about a mountain of compression and even with my distribution capacity (XSAN), it'll still take too long to work from the source files. And what we need are some lowres, catalogue type output. The H.264 from compressor is working great for our high def stuff to TV stations (they use it for final approval). Anyway, I found two workarounds. First, I'm exporting to mp4. Then, I managed to go from H.264 to photojpg and back to wmv and the result is satisfactory for my purposes. I just wanted to avoid the additional step. Apple is supposed to be providing a wmv Quicktime codec for QT7, but it's not out yet.

it sounds like what you need is batch encoding capability, start it up and walk away... have you looked at flip4mac? it's supposed to have two-pass wmv capability, and be qt 7 compatible... mp4 is a horrible format from the standpoint of picture quality, with flip4mac you'd be cutting out that extra encoding step.

Bingo
 

Dan, that's a birdie! Excellent. Thanks. Buying it as we speak ;-)

"... to put it another way, h.264 video is nowhere near being ready for distribution to the general public, because there aren't any players out there for it..."

Aren't ANY players? The Quicktime 7 player would be what?

You and I are on Mac. Quicktime 7 for Windows is still vapourware; unless I missed a major announcement.

QuickTime 7 for Windows is hardly vaporware. You can download it as a preview here:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/preview/

Available Since June 6th
 

Steve Jobs annouced the QT7 preview of QT for windows with .H264 on June 6th at the mac WWDC:

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005...quicktime.html

Cemil, you might find the following of interest:

http://www.balooga.com/mpeg4.php3

Okay, first of all, I had heard there was a beta of QT7 for W but I could not find it. Thanks!! My question is: has anyone tried it? Does it work? If it does now, it solves my problem for the next two weeks worth of showings.
Thanks.
== edit ==
I obviously meant, has anyone tried it with H.264 files originally compressed on a mac.

Cemil,

I've played the HD H.264 movies Apple has on their website with the QuickTime 7 Windows preview. Works fine for me.

Excellent. Solves all my problems. A link to the download is going up on our site in the next hour. Wow. Time savings for us!!

it would be zero market penetration in a universe of ~900 million internet users.

if you want your content to be easily viewable by the general public, h.264 is not a good choice at this point in time.

QuickTime is a cross-platform application. If you think Mac market share = QuickTime users it's a bad assumption. iTunes (also cross platform), which is used with some of the tens of millions of iPod sold around the world, requires quicktime. Everyone who has installed iTunes for Windows has installed quicktime.

Quicktime has also been used as a component of computer games on Windows for decades and is used as a required component in many other Windows applications.

Apple claims that QT6 was downloaded 350 million times with 98% of those downloads were from PC users, at a rate of over 10 million per month.

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/whyqt/

350 million is 38% of 900 million internet users cited, not zero. iTunes (which has supported video downloads since version 4.8) has probably pushed that number and percent up a bit. I can't find good data on this however.

y'all on this thread might be able to answer my question. this is my first attempt at a web delivery for video.

from FCP 4.5, i compressed using QT 7.0.1 for high bandwidth streaming and uploaded it to a server. it seems that only a very narrow range of people could view it...anyone using an earlier version of QT than QT7 could not view it, and very few PC people seemed able to view it.

given that compressing seems to chew up a lot of time, how should i re-compress this so that PC people can view it? can i just upload a second version as AVI or an MP4? would that work? how can i get PC folks w/out QT7 to be able to view this? i'd like to know this not just for this video but for future reference.

thanks in advance for any advice....

RANT MODE ON

BTW, freakin' Bill Gates and Steve Jobs should rub their big giant brains together and solve this web delivery format issue for everybody once and for all! too many incoherent (**&^%&^%&* options!

RANT MODE OFF

*ahem,* thanks for listening.....

Agree with the rant.

As to the QT7 issue I would need more information. What codec was used to compress and what settings were used?

Can you provide a link to the media?

The issue here is that you used a new format that has only just recently been released. As such, not everyone has upgraded to QT version 7. It is available on the Mac and in Beta test on PC. This is normal for any new format be it QT based or WMV.

As for your question about producing something that more people can view, if you exported from FCP using Compressor and one of the MPEG-4 presets, then you'll have what you want as that format is a standard and has widespread support in QT and other players. PC and Mac users can view MPEG-4 just fine.

You can make your own compression settings in Compressor from any of the presupplied ones. I start with the recently enhanced one for MPEG-4 called MPEG-4 Improved NTSC for Fast Cable Streaming. Select it and press the "Duplicate" button.

With your duplicate selected, you can now customize the parameters in the tabbed sections at the bottom of the Compressor window. Here's one that produces good results for me:
Name: MPEG-4 HQ
Description: 320x240 15fps VBR
File Extension: mp4
Audio Encoder
Format: MPEG4
Sample Rate: 32.000kHz
Channels: 1
Bits Per Sample: 16
AAC encoder quality: medium
Video Encoder
Format: MPEG4
Width: 320
Height: 240
Pixel aspect ratio: default
Crop: None
Frame rate: 15
ISMA Profile: 1
Variable bit rate, high quality

If you prefer the look of 24FPS, you can tweak it to suit. The ISMA Profile is an improved one and in combination with the Bit Rate setting of "High VBR" gives you far better results than plain old MPEG-4 exports from QuickTime Pro. Also, don't underestimate the effects that filtering can have to improve results.

You are starting a journey. Learning the ins and outs of compression is a learned skill like other things in video production and benefits greatly from personal experimentation.

cemil asked about qt7, which has zero market penetration, and is only in beta for the pc... it is NOT ready for primetime, as meryem just told you!:

thank you for backing up everything that i have been saying about h.264 out here.

now try to imagine how long it'll take for ~900 million people to have h.264 capability... we are talking months and months here.

platform fanatics who refuse to accept web statistics only make things harder for themselves and their customers.

if you need professional quality web video right now, in a web video format that everyone can see, check out that flip4mac encoder... do not get suckered into using mpeg4, the picture quality is garbage, and i posted the test clips to prove it.

A quick interjection about our own needs. Our stuff needs to be visible to about 100 key people, not more. These are mostly television execs and international organisation types who are well equipped as regards codecs, players, etc.

This said, I do agree, and spend time inhouse fighting the codec fanatics, that we do have to, when distributing to the masses, accept that there are statistics. For this reason, when we do mass distributions, like our Women are film that was downloaded 22,000 times, we make it available in a wide variety of formats.

A quick tidbit. Our stats showed that QT was the number one download, not WMV. I was surprised, frankly. The QT downloads represented 65%!!! Of these, 72% were on Windows. Again, I was surprised.

[ps. forgive me if I answer to any posts with delay, I'm in the middle of a move :(( ]

This is confusing Cemil, because the numbers are the opposite of what you said.

Dan, where are your test clips?

I know this is just a small sample size and so just anecdotal evidence and not statistically significant. But at home we have four computers, only one of which has Quicktime. At work I operate in an office with 26 computers, 9 which do video related work each day, and none of them have Quicktime. Windows Media Player is already there on PCs, so that's what gets used. QT is already there on Macs but at only 3% market share, that's not near as much default use. Everything over 3% requires a deliberate choice and Apple's aggravating QT website makes that choice easy to abandon in the middle of the download process.

Patrick, I am curious, what exactly do you find aggravating about the QT Web site? What specifically makes you want to abandon a download of QT?

Ernest, thanks for the tips. that gives me some idea of where to begin experimenting. my problem was that when i selected the "quicktime conversion" feature, it automatically defaults to an H.264 compression type. not knowing any better and figuring that the default would be set to the most common compression type, i went ahead with the default setting.

i think the H.264 image looks nice (the link is http://ia108620.us.archive.org/1/ite...llgooddogs.mov --since peter, i think, asked), but i received a lot of negative feedback for having unwittingly used QT 7 and H.264

in its standard compression types mode, FCP offers the following choices:

Animation
Apple Pixlet Video
Apple VC H.263
BMP
Cinepak
Component Video
DV-PAL
DV/DVCPRO-NTSC
DVC PRO PAL
DVC PRO HD 1080i60
DVCPRO HD 720P60
DVCPRO50 - NTSC
DVCPRO50 - PAL
Graphics
H.261
H.263
H.264
JPEG 2000
Motion JPEG A
MOtion JPEG B
MPEG-4 Video
Photo-JPEG
Planar RGB
PNG
Sorenson Video
Sorenson Video 3
TGA
TIFF
Uncompressed 10-bit 4:2:2
Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2

And don't get me started with the Compressor options!

If I am just trying to compress a standard MiniDV - NTSC - 4:1:1 image for basic (streaming) web delivery, which is the best option? I can rule out the obvious ones myself, frinstance, I'm obviously not shooting PAL or DVCPRO or HD or a pixlet video, but is there a best choice from among, say, H.261-3-4 or the MPEG-4 Video option. Or is there something lurking in the Sorenson option?

What I am trying to get at, is, which choice, straight from Final Cut Pro's array of choices will maximize my exposure, since H.264, the default setting, is obviously not there yet?

I may have a very weak and imperfect understanding of what Apple is up to here, but it seems to me that FCP is (perhaps prematurely) anticipating HD settings by setting the default to H.264. But that doesn't serve me right now, in terms of reaching maximum audience. So which of these available choices would? Maybe I am just trying to cut corners by requesting advice instead of running a bunch of compression experiments (which seems quite time-consuming), but my commitment is more focused on production than delivery. From the standpoint of delivery, I am less engaged by the academic debates and more interested in being able to send a link to a friend and have him or her be able to view it without a big hairball ensuing on the other end.

Am I making sense?

Hi Peter.
I don't think so. I believe that the mass of users is still *not* using Quicktime. I agree that the Windows machine park is still on WMP. But my stats, on this particular download were -- to my surprise -- skewed to Quicktime. In fact, after reading your post, I asked one of my sysadmins to double check and indeed, my figures are correct. My guess is, that most of my downloaders were media types and they, indeed, do have Quicktime on their PCs. I will say one thing - not wanting to in any way be dragged into a win/mac discussion - and that is that we cannot underestimate the number of Quicktime users out there. I don't think we're talking 3%. That's all for now. Back to my move :((

thanks for the feedback on those 22,000 downloads... that is a pretty significant number... since the 72% on windows o.s. does not reflect the state of the internet, there must be a reason you are pulling in more mac users... the title women in film(?) would perhaps indicate a greater interest by the female gender, maybe they tend to have more macs than pcs? pure speculation on my part, just looking for a reason... if you have the clip set up for streaming, repeat visitors using macs would skew the stats as well.

i can easily max out my 100 gb monthly bandwidth limit with video clips, and i never get requests for the qt format... probably ~25,000(?) unique url's a month across all my websites.

with the current explosion in internet advertising, i have applied to be a publisher with a company that is serving up advertising pre-roll in front of video clips, but they are doing it for small publishers like us... it's similar to what you see on msnvideo.com, but still in beta because no one has ever done this before with small fry websites, it's very cutting edge... there is no qt option with them, it's all windows media... couple that sort of thing with no qt drm, and you'll see why it's not really a pro format that you can make money with on the 'net.

you can download the video test clips at the website in my sig file below.

i would agree with that, for sure... if apple is telling the truth about that 350 million downloads of qt 6.5, you can see that qt market penetration could probably be upwards of 50% of the computers on the 'net... most important, tho, it's the people who want to see 'net video that are going thru the hassle of installing qt... qt does not come pre-installed on pc's, it has never been a native part of the operating system.

I had no intention of starting a platform war here. I use WMP and encode for it all the time. I was only objecting to what I felt was an over-generalization about QT based on my experience.

I have always assumed that QT is around 35-38% of media players, WMP higher, and Flash highest (Macromedia claims 97%). Flash video has improved a lot in recent years. I have always assumed that most internet statistics are to be taken with a grain of salt because they generally come from sources with some kind of commercial interest.

Cemil, sorry. I misread your post (missed "of these").

Meryem, H.264 (MPEG-4 Part 10) is being widely adpoted for all kinds of purposes, including satellite broadcast and the HD-DVD and Blu-ray player specifications (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264).

The H.264 standard is all about HD for Apple. It is more widely expected that Apple will introduce an "iTunes Movie Store" built on the Music Store model. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is in talks with major labels to license music videos (see:http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...597#post335597 You can read what I think the implications of a iTunes Movie Store might be on that post.) to provide via the music store. There are a rumors, in spite of Steve Jobs' constant denials, of an iPod-like video player in September.

H.264 can get the file size/quality relationship to the point where it would be practical to download films and burn the to one of the new DVD formats that support HD. Apple may be setting up to push push push here. (see: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050120.html and http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050609.html for interesting speculation).

Peter,

For a while you were forced to download iTunes to get Quicktime, so I abandoned there more than once. Lately that seems better except having to uncheck all the pre-spam possibilities.

I do hate having to acknowledge every single time I launch QT that I don't want to upgrade to QT Pro (no option to never ask me again, just select Upgrade or Later). So, since this is nag-ware, I choose not to use it unless I absolutely have to. There have been many links to short films or clips in this forum that I've just not taken the time to fool with because I recognize the QT suffix.

QT does seem to produce a good image, but certainly no better than the image possible with Windows Media Player. I'm not saying that QT is bad, just that I personally don't fool with it unless I think the piece has some over-riding benefit that outways the hassle from using QT.

My understanding is that Apple removed the nag, very annoying, in all versions of QT 7.

In previous versions one could disable the nag by setting your system date ahead ten years, open QT, close QT, and then reset your system back to the right date.

Patrick: I too have ignored movies posted here because of the wmv suffix.

the thing i really dislike about wmv is that it doesn't stream, it downloads to my already packed G4 hard drive, and since i took up video, i need all the space i can get. i much prefer to stream video whenever possible.

my brother, who designs TV systems for a living, thinks H.264 is definitely the future standard and that i should just keep compressing in that format and get my audience up to the standard, which he perceives as inevitable..."a year out" is how he casually described it. seems as if it is already decided off in the future.

i don't know if i agree philosophically with foisting the format on the audience--i just want people to be able to watch my video with relative ease, dammit--, but he is usually fairly prescient about the future these sorts of things.

Meryem,

I like the idea of not having to download videos to watch them, but I HATE the fact that I never make it through a whole streaming video without it stopping to buffer more content. And I have pretty dang good cable modem throughput:

Communications 2.4 megabits per second
Storage: 288.2 kilobytes per second
1MB file download: 3.6 seconds
Subjective rating: Great

So in practice, I've put a shortcut to the Recycle Bin in the My Documents folder. I download videos to that folder and then just empty the Recycle Bin once a day. After I start a download, I just go back to other business until complete and then when the download is complete, I watch it uninterrupted.

Maryem,
You are making this far more complicated than it need be. When you Export using QuickTime Conversion, you are invoking the standard QuickTime Pro compression utility. Don't read anything into the default setting. Apple is doing what it can to promote the use of H.264 and so set the default when QT7 is installed. You'd probably do the same.

If you had instead Exported using Compressor, you would have found a list of presets with all those parameters you listed taken care of for you. You will also get better results using Compressor as it has access to and uses the advanced compression features of the underlying QT subsystem. The QT utility does not use the advanced features. But if you insist, on using the QT utility, select QuickTime Movie and DSL/Cable - Medium. That will give you a 320x240 MPEG-4.

To get improved results, going straight from FCP to a format that anyone can play, do as I recommended earlier:
Select your sequence in the bin window
Select File->Export using Compressor
Under the MPEG-4 NTSC Source Material twistie, select
MPEG-4 Improved NTSC for Fast Cable Streaming
Change the ISMA Profile to "Improved" and the Bit Rate to HIGH VBR.

The only hairball that will result is the one that occurs here because you chose a format counter to the agenda of certain members.

You may be missing half the equation on your ideas about streaming. Streaming media requires a streaming capable server. Most web sites that folks use are not streaming servers. When a person parks a video clip, no matter what the format, on a web site, it will probably not stream. You will experience spots where it will come to a halt and then take off again. You will have to wait until the entire clip is downloaded to your system and cached.

A streaming server leaves no files behind. A streaming server sends chunks that are cached and played out but not the entire clip.

I have several clips parked on a server right now as QT files. They are however in a format called Progressive Download that allows the QT player to stack up chunks and begin playing them before the entire file is downloaded to cache.

I used to run my own true streaming server based on Linux from my home. I had a static IP so it was easy. I streamed MP3s, had a streaming radio station and hosted lots of QT and WMV files as well as a real server.

Just be aware that if you don't have a streaming server, it isn't really streaming.

Sean McHenry

Ernest, thanks again for the tips. I'm merely trying to learn about and understand something brand new (to me), and the nuances of its mystifying, competing languages.

I'm not digging the characterization of "complaining" --it's a complete misinterpretation of my intent. The FCP manuals are pretty useless, so I resurrected this thread in search of help. I have no other agenda.

there was a similar sort of complaint in this forum before about that same issue of mac-based wmv players "not streaming"... it was suggested that the person take a look at the settings of their player, because the length of the cache can be set to whatever you want... including downloading most or all of the entire streaming clip before it plays.

if you are running on the ragged edge of storage space like that, you should get it fixed, because you are in danger of crashing the hard drive... drives need ~10% or so of free space to function properly.

qt 7 is the most dysfunctional qt release i have ever seen... you can play a non-streaming clip from anywhere(?), and it refuses to allow you to save it out to somewhere else from within the player... the nagware message comes up for everything.

there can't be a qt-based "itunes movie store" without qt drm, the movie studios will never agree to unsecure movie downloading.

Sorry about that. Didn't mean it negatively. Can I get partial credit for saying "Kinda Complaining"? :-)

I edited my posting and reworded it to say "...you listed..." instead of "...you complained about...". Thanks for the polite response. Also, the agenda comment wasn't directed at you.

Please understand that you have chosen to learn about compression with a professional level product and it's going to be bewildering. I'm actually trying to help you find a simple approach from which you can experiment and learn on your own.

I learned FCP (back in the 2.0 days) using the tutorial that came in the package. It's only a 1/4 thick and goes quickly. You may find it beneficial now that you've got some "learn by experiment" experience. Also, don't forget the online help. You can often find a step by step on what you want to do and the fact that it's online means you can actually find it (versus thumbing the manuals).

ernest, no hard feelings. your advice was otherwise quite helpful. my own opinions on the subject are decidedly half-baked (maybe more like 1/16 baked, at this point), and i am completely not attached to any of them and solely here to learn...this particular thread, while loaded with the most useful information from a practical standpoint, also seems to be the site of a larger philosophical debate about the platform and its standards, which seems occasionally more of a hindrance to the practical advice portion than helpful, at times. still, useful to hear, if a bit heated periodically. i've learned quite a bit from eavesdropping on the conversation.

Meryem, use the Sorenson codec for widest possible use. I encode tons of videos for a university and was initially inclined to export to mp4 because it has a better quality/filesize ratio. However, I quickly learned that not everyone could open these files. While the adoption of mp4 has increased in the few months since I've been doing this, the sorenson codec will be playable on the widest range of quicktime versions and operating systems.