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Problems with WMV and Flip4Mac
Here are some issues I’m having with Flip4Mac:
1) Audio/Video sync is off sometimes. Playing the same file on a PC results in no Audio/Video sync issues. Of course there is no constant here so troubleshooting is out the window. This seems to happen intermittently using all flavors of encoding: Single and Multi Pass, CBR and VBR.
2) I can’t get reliable results with my encoding. It seems the only way to get a visually lossless video is to do a Single Pass CBR with the quality at 100%. This leaves my with a 30 Mbps file which totally misses the point of a distribution based codec.
3) Quality is just not there when compared to h.264. I’m wondering if I’m setting the bar too high for Flip4Mac. I know quality, low bit rate wmv files are possible, I’ve seen them. Maybe episode will do a better job for me? Maybe I should buy a PC to do my WMV compression?
I wish I could just talk my clients into using QuickTime, VLC, or a modern browser to view the h264 files I create but clients are clients and what a client wants a client gets. I still get the question every now and then, “what’s a browser”.
Any references or answers would help.
Thanks.
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3 Replies
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[Brian Alexander] “Quality is just not there when compared to h.264”
You can’t compare WMV 9 to H.264, indeed many would argue that even VC-1 is not as good as H.264.
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There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs. We don’t. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say “Would you buy a new version because of bugs?” You won’t get a single person to say they’d buy a new version because of bugs. We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis.Bill Gates. Focus Magazine No. 43 (23 October 1995)
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Hey Brian,
I’m having the same issue. I’ve been using F4M as well as Episode. I’ve been trying to get a good looking WMV compression on 30 files for a few weeks now. Not only does each one (about TRT 4mins all around) take about 3-4 hours to compress, but it looks terrible with artifacts and data-moshing abundant. It ranges from fairly unacceptable to vomit inducing.I wish I could offer some suggestions, but all I have on the matter is my bitter sympathy.
Good luck, and please let me know if you find a silver bullet.
Cheers,
Chris -
Make sure you’re using Episode 5.3 and Flip4Mac 2.2.3.7
When using either start with a template to make sure the issues aren’t related to your settings.
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