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…
