• Adobe Premiere Pro

  CS33 media encoder’s h264/mp4 files won’t play on some macs, why?

  Posted by Shayne Weyker on November 14, 2007 at 4:01 am

  I’ve been encoding stuff to h264 (ipod, 640×480 setting, 32khz) so I can offer the same file for ipod and web viewing) using adobe adobe media encoder from PPro CS3 (using as PC install of the master suite). Files like this:

  https://realtime.rhsmith.umd.edu/media/podcasts/campaign/grx-speech-pres-mote.mp4

  Now I’m getting feedback that some mac users can’t play the mp4 files adobe media encoder produces, getting a string of garbage text on their screen. It’s as if their computer never heard of mp4 file type even though in one case I’ve been told a user with this problem installed the latest QT player.

  I see that QT player has the option to recognize mp4 media or not. But why would any mac user turn this off?

  What should I do? Rename the file to .mov? That has the disadvantage that it breaks a few links out there…

  Can I make an h264 .mp4 with adobe cs3 media encoder that will behave on all reasonably modern macs?

  –Shayne Weyker
  https://weykervideo.com

  Shayne Weyker replied 18 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Mike Velte

  November 14, 2007 at 12:30 pm

  You movie plays fine on my PC.
  There 2 QT player settings that could cause the problem. Both under Edit>Quicktime Preferences;
  Under File Types, Mpeg-4 Media needs to be selected.
  Under Browser, “Play movies automatically” needs to be selected or the browser will parse the data in the file.
  Also under Browser is MIME Settings where Mpeg must be selected.
  I suspect their problem is installing other players which change QT preferences and then they cannot play Mpeg 4.
  Try clanging the extension to .mov
• 

  Shayne Weyker

  November 15, 2007 at 4:46 pm

  I don’t think we can ask the users to adjust their their preferences, the movies have to just work.

  Changing the .mp4 extension to .mov made the QT player come up with a ? in front of the QT logo (this was on a machine with safari and the latest QT player)

  So I just re-encoded the files as an h264/.mov and, importantly, once I gave them new file names (emptying cache and resarting browser wasn’t enough), safari would play those movies.

  But I was really looking forward to encoding to one format h264/.mp4 and that being good for mac and pc.

  Does anyone know if there a certain date after which it will be safe to use the “Ipod” h264/mp4 files for web use becuase flash player will cope with them?

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