codecs on mac

Mutedblaze · Post by **Mutedblaze** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:26 pm

I've used a windows before and had no problems, but now i'm using a mac which i know almost nothing about and i'm having problems playing my footage. I read that the community codec pack only works on windows. So could someone please guide me to some good codecs that work on a mac. a link would really be appreciated. most of my files are .avi if that helps.

Org Profile · Post by **LantisEscudo** » Mon Aug 25, 2008 8:38 pm

There's really two options on Mac: Perian or self-contained player.

Perian is a QuickTime component that will let you use the default QuickTime Player to play most formats out there. http://perian.org/

Your other option is to use another player entirely. I personally use VLC ( http://www.videolan.org ), though its soft-subtitle support really sucks.

On my mac, I use VLC to play files, though I have Perian installed as well, mainly as a backup (and because it lets me use Huffy files in FCP).

Kaji01 · Post by **Kaji01** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 5:31 am

What do you recommend for a distribution format to encode to on a Mac? XviD support seems lacking last I checked, and the ones I've tried so far seem to either turn it to crap or inordinately bloat the file size for general distribution. I know there's got to be a middle ground somewhere...

Org Profile · Post by **LantisEscudo** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 12:12 pm

I normally export from FCP as an uncompressed AVI (Export using Quicktime Conversion) and then do my distro encodes on a PC, though I have done a couple encodes on the Mac using mencoderor ffmpegX when I was pressed for time.

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 12:24 pm

Kaji01 wrote:What do you recommend for a distribution format to encode to on a Mac?

H.264 MP4, definitely. Handbrake is getting libavcodec input support soon, so that will make it the best GUI transcoder on the Mac. Just make sure you're using Main profile if you want your file to be playable in Quicktime without Perian and the like.

Qyot27 · Post by **Qyot27** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 2:08 pm

Kaji01 wrote:What do you recommend for a distribution format to encode to on a Mac? XviD support seems lacking last I checked, and the ones I've tried so far seem to either turn it to crap or inordinately bloat the file size for general distribution. I know there's got to be a middle ground somewhere...

Some time ago there was a thread with Mac builds of x264. Here it is:
http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... hp?t=85232

Of course, in the 7½ months since that discussion took place, x264 went through even more revisions, and the build mentioned is behind the curve again, but it's better than nothing. Although, if you're good at compiling software then you could take a look at the x264 source code and do a current build yourself.

It's CLI-only, though, so that may be a deterrent. I have a standard set of commands that I figured up using MeGUI under Windows, and I just keep those in a text file and adjust them as needed when I use x264's CLI (nowadays I only use MeGUI when I want the computer to shutdown after encoding finishes). My problem is I like expansive GUIs so I can tweak things a lot, and I've found that not many Mac encoding solutions share that opinion (or if they do, they impose other restrictions on what you can use for input, which disqualify them).

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 3:19 pm

Here's an up-to-date build clean from git (no patches), including libgpac for the MP4 output. Just run install.sh from Terminal. It installs to /usr/local. It only accepts raw YUV as input, though, so the easiest way to do that is to grab mplayer and use -vo yuv4mpeg.

If you guys need faac, mp4box, mplayer, ffmpeg, or anything else let me know. Also, let me know if anything doesn't work – I usually only compile for my own use. It's 32 bit x86, not universal.

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 3:48 pm

Since I'm such a nice guy, I decided to whip up an installer package for those of you who are afraid of the Terminal (which raises the question of why you'd be using Terminal apps like x264). Anyway, it's nice and pretty, includes some information, and the GNU GPL. Get it here.

Org Profile · Post by **LantisEscudo** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 7:40 pm

Tab, is there any way for you to make a Universal build? I'm on a PPC, and I can't find any kind of recent binary build of mp4box. x264's in fink, so that's not a problem, but without a decent way of muxing an mp4, it's not particularly useful.

Tab. · Post by **Tab.** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 7:44 pm

LantisEscudo wrote:Tab, is there any way for you to make a Universal build? I'm on a PPC, and I can't find any kind of recent binary build of mp4box. x264's in fink, so that's not a problem, but without a decent way of muxing an mp4, it's not particularly useful.

Unfortunately, compiling GPAC on OS X is a royal pain, and there's no simple way to create universal binaries outside of XCode. I'll look into it, though.