Compress or not?

[Dave Gage]

[Brett Sherman] “I haven’t tried x264 on Compressor. Didn’t know it was there. Is it an add-on? I have no doubt it beats Apple’s H.264 implementation which has always been rather crappy.”

Yes, you would need to download the codec and install it. It very much beats out the default H.264. Here’s a couple of links if they are still good:
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24173/x264encoder
Developers website- https://www003.upp.so-net.ne.jp/mycometg3/

My most recent problem is that it appears the Apple versions of H.264 and even x264 when exported as a standard .mp4 from Compressor (or QT 7 or FCPX) don’t work with the newer versions of Android devices. They used to work fine with Android, Flash Players, and iDevices, but no longer. All my video streams from a proprietary Flash Player on my websites with HTML5 fall back, so this is an issue for me. I will likely need to re-export about 75 40-minute projects from FCPX and then re-encode them as .mp4 in a non-Apple app. I did find that using MPEG Streamclip and the x264 encoder played nicely with the newer Android devices. I haven’t taken the time yet to figure out why MPEG Streamclip worked or re-do the 75 videos, but I suppose I will need to do it soon as I had another complaint this morning. This likely wouldn’t affect you or most people here at the Cow, but I thought I’d mention it since it was fresh on my mind.

Dave

[Nick Ring]

What do you prefer to use for MPEG2 encoding? In my limited experience, I’ve tended towards Adobe Media Encoder over Compressor (5.0-6, haven’t tried CC). Still working with MPEG2 on a regular basis, so a potential improvement could be nice.