HONEY, I SHRUNK MY .AVI!

TEKnician · Post by **TEKnician** » Sat Feb 18, 2012 9:15 pm

Equipment: Mac
Software: VirtualDub, MPEG Streamclip 1.9.3b7, Quicktime Player 10.1

I have come across something rather interesting in my compression experiments. I found a codec called "Apple Intermediate Codec" [yeah, Apple was never really good at coming up with names for their products] that seems to keep all the quality of my huffy avi fresh from VirtualDub while shrinking the file size IMMENSELY.

For example, here is a screenshot of the avi file right from VDub:

Spoiler :

Looks amazing, right? Now look at this:

Spoiler :

I watched both videos side-by-side and saw the exact same quality. I even spotted the same minor imperfections when i went frame by frame.

Now my question is, before I jump the gun and convert ALL of my DVDs with this codec:

IS ANYONE FAMILIAR WITH THIS CODEC AND IS THERE SOMETHING THAT I AM OVERLOOKING? Might I run into a problem that I am not aware of?

Mister Hatt · Post by **Mister Hatt** » Sun Feb 19, 2012 3:15 am

Stop deviating from convention and just use the standard normal tools? UTVideo works in OSX now, so there is really no excuse. AVC lossless is fine too I suppose. Those are tried and tested formats which work on all operating systems so there is no need to go for a poorly supported and probably buggy platform specific codec.

mirkosp · Post by **mirkosp** » Sun Feb 19, 2012 7:00 am

Mister Hatt wrote:AVC lossless is fine too I suppose.

NLEs hardly like lossless AVC. Lossy Intra-only AVC is another matter though.

Mister Hatt · Post by **Mister Hatt** » Sun Feb 19, 2012 9:05 am

How are they with QT decoders? I'm curious as to how many actually work with utv...

mirkosp · Post by **mirkosp** » Sun Feb 19, 2012 1:27 pm

Those should be fine. It's just lossless h.264 that is troublesome, which is true on Windows too. I guess they don't like Hi444PP or something?

TEKnician · Post by **TEKnician** » Sun Feb 19, 2012 4:16 pm

Here's my dilemma:

UT never plays in QT. All I get is a white screen.

And call me what you will, but I like having all my episodes ripped and compressed in full and ready to be edited with. So storage space is getting to be an issue as well. I only have 3 TB...and these 15GB episodes just kill my RAM in no time flat when I edit them in FCPX.

BTW, my final projects that I upload here are all converted to H264 after I'm done editing anyways.

Mister Hatt · Post by **Mister Hatt** » Thu Feb 23, 2012 1:20 am

UTV works fine for me in QT, both on Umezawa's public builds as well as the various patched and source tree builds around. It's also part of libav now at least as a decoder so mplayer and whatnot can handle it too. If you really care about compression, I guess x264 is your best bet, or if you know C/asm/QT component API I can PM you the theory behind a codec I haven't gotten around to writing and you can try to make something better heh.

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Thu Feb 23, 2012 11:31 am

I researched about the Apple Intermediate Codec, it seems like it would be fine to edit with. But its not lossless. But if you are fine with the quality, do whatever you like, I suppose.

AnimeMusicVideos.org