May 10, 2005
Mac OS X Tiger Screws Up My Videos
After upgrading my wife’s iMac to Tiger this last week, I went and made a few more movies to post using iMovie. They looked good on the Mac. I never thought to test them on Windows. Today, my sister e-mails me and asks what is wrong with the movies. When you watch them on Windows, you either get audio and just a white video screen or you get an error that says:
QuickTime is missing software required to perform this operation. Unfortunately, it is not available on the QuickTime server.
I did some backtracking and found out that iMove changed the “Broadband - Medium” video output format from MPEG-4 to H.264. H.264 is going to be great — when it works for everyone! Right now to play QuickTime movies in H.264 you have to have QuickTime 7 which is only on the Mac right now. Windows version to be released “soon” according to Apple.
So short term, I can’t use H.264 so I re-encoded with MPEG-4 and the movies work again.
I am not excited about using H.264 at all now even after QuickTime 7 for Windows is out because anyone that doesn’t upgrade, will get the white screen. That sucks.
Maybe there is some way to force a required version…
Have you tried Dash blog yet? its another widget. I can't seem to get the correct url for it to update MT. I've seen other MT blogs out there who have used Dash Blog, so I know it works. Let me know if you decide to try it and get it working so I can fix mine.
Forcing me to download Apple software or any software for that matter is a good way to make me run screaming from your site. The JPGs look fine here. -JW
Use Flash video. Everyone can see that. Check out Macromedia's site, there is a free plugin for Quicktime so in iMovie HD you can go Share > Advanced > QuickTime to Flash .flv. Macromedia's got it well documented on their site on how to put the .flv into a swf. All you need is dreamweaver, they have a special plug-in where you just go insert > flash video. Unfortunately you have to pay for that one. Seriously, it's really easy.
Another (non-free) way is to use Sorenson Squeeze. I like this program best because you can export in a lot of different formats. Including Mpeg-1 which pretty much anyone that owns a computer with a color screen can play. Also it exports Quicktime, Real, Flash .flv, and Flash .swf, and Mpeg-2.
It's great to make a QuickTime right out of an app cause it's so easy, but unfortunately not a lot of people have that plug-in. Basically if a plug-in doesn't come pre-installed on someone's system then they probably wont have it, people don't like downloading things. Flash comes bulit into IE which (unfortunately) everyone uses so you can pretty much bet that almost everyone can see your video. Mpeg-1 is a good choice too though. Ok I'm done with my rant. Hope it helped somewhat.
I've checked for the plug in on Macromedia site but NO RESULT.
Could me link to that one. Free plugin for iMovie to export in Flash.
Regards
http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/downloads.html#fmxpro_vid_up
It's under the heading: "Video Update 1.2 for Flash MX Professional 2004"