CS4 Media Encoder, MP4, Output Garbled

[Vince Becquiot]

Try downgrading your Quicktime version. Also, Premiere dooesn’t support Divx and the likes. Unless the footage is from a camcorder, you can expect issues at import and export stages.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Phil Lochner]

Thanks for the quick response. However:

I don’t see how downgrading quicktime will make a difference? Quicktime plays the resulting MP4 file just fine. It’s VLC and WMP11 that won’t play the resulting MP4 file.

PP CS4 handles and edits the original footage fine and without problems. I can edit my AVIs, DIVX, whatever, and output them using Media Encoder to MPEG2, AVI, MOV, etc – those all play perfectly in VLC, WMP11, and Quicktime player.

Regardless of the original source encoding, Media Encoder just won’t make a MP4 that VLC or WMP11 will play.

[Phil Lochner]

Hmm, I think I may be ahead of myself with H264 then. I was under the impression that H264 was kind of a magic bullet type of codec, which I could run all my videos through and produce great looking (and smaller file sized), cross platform output.

I didn’t realize that MP4 / H264 was still “Quicktime” as far as the Windows world thinks, and I’m well aware of the problems years ago that I’ve had getting MOV files to play in anything other than Quicktime Player.

My end goal for this project is to get all of my home movies (shot on various sources, such as DV cam, little 30-second MOV and AVIs taken by digital cameras, my new AVCHD camera, etc) into a universal format that I can play on my PC, my Macbook Pro, streamed to my PS3, and/or Popcorn Hour A110.

Perhaps the better question would be to ask what high quality formats I should be examining other than H264?

[Vince Becquiot]

Got it. Well, VLC and Windows media never really supported QT codecs very well (if at all), since QT likes to keep those for themselves just like QT never supported WMV.

Why not play them in their native player which is Quicktime?

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Vince Becquiot]

Honestly, H.264 is a great codec, probably the next Flash killer (which it has already replaced in many areas). AFAIK, the Premiere export is based on the Quicktime codec. There are many flavor of H.264, including AVCHD, so support is all over the map right now.

WMV at 3MB/s will get you a very nice picture, but if you plan on editing the footage again, I wouldn’t recompress.

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Phil Lochner]

Thanks for your help. I’m currently trying out the H264 Blu-Ray preset from Media Encoder CS4, and muxing them to .m4v.

I’m not sure if this will help me out in my quest to create a H264 file that can be played by all my devices, but I figure I’ll give it a shot.

[Josh Jensen]

Phil,

Funny, I was thinking of doing the exact same thing as you with my home videos. I did a sample video today and now I am having the same issue(garbled output) using H.264 when playing in VLC Player(my favorite player).

I am using Windows 7 and it plays fine in WMP and Quick time but not in VLC Player. I also uploaded a clip to Vimeo and viewing is still “garbled”.

Let me know if you find anything out.

[Phil Lochner]

I kind of gave up on it after I couldn’t find any combination of MP4 encoding that would universally work with VLC, WMP, my PS3, my X360, and now my Popcorn Hour.

I made 8mb bitrate preset based on a the MPEG2/Blu-Ray preset in Media Encoder CS4. I rename the file to .mpg and it works great, so far, but it does generate a larger file.

[Michelle Reed]

Hey guys,

I am having the same problems, I’m ok with it not working in VLC as I am happy to play it in QT, but I don’t understand why it will play in quicktime and in PP if you import the file back in, but when the file is uploaded to youtube or vimeo its still corrupted?? Surely these websites support this codec? Any ideas/suggestions would be great,

Thanks

Michelle Reed

[Laurence Yates]

I’m in the middle of a changeover from CS3 to CS4 and so still have both suites installed on my workstation.

I found that I the MP4 files I was exporting from CS4 using the iPod presets were playing in VLC ok, but were garbled in Quicktime player (started on a green frame and jumped around the timeline like a Japanese horror film). I had tried these MP4 files on both PC and Mac and with the latest Quicktime installed – but always the same.

In an act of desperation, I went to my Adobe Premiere CS3 folder, searched for all files with “mp4” in the name (included .ax and .dll files) and dumped them into the CS4 application folders (After Effects, Premiere, Adobe Media Encoder). I said yes to copy over the newer versions and the problem went away. I may have just copied over the latest MP4 algorithms for best quality and compression, but at least the files will play in Quicktime, iTunes and and ultimately my iPhone.