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Video format for EVERYONE
Hi there
I need to put a standalone video file on a CD to be distributed to hundreds of people. These people are likely to have old computers and no knowledge of video formats and downloading the latest codecs.Can anyone suggest the best single format for a standalone video that will open in the default players on Windows (XP onwards) and Mac OS (10.4 onwards, but not as important as Windows XP compatibility) that will allow me to display a 1024×768 screen capture video.
Thanks
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4 Replies
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Sadly not that easy, one thing is your requirement for a video frame size of 1024×768 which is going to need a pretty beefy machine to play back at a decent frame rate.
That aside, if your priority is for Windows then I’d suggest using WMV, on the Mac it would have to be Quicktime using MPEG-4 simple profile, simply because you are targeting low end older machines.
The only format that will work equally well on both platforms is MPEG-1, however you might find it difficult to find an encoder that will encode to that frame size and you might not get the quality you desire.
__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”
Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009 -
I agree….you are looking to encode to a “modern” frame size but want it to be viewable in older computers.
How about a series of JPEG still files? Or a PDF document? That goes back a ways and could support the higher frame size but with stills and type.
MPEG-1 is your only other best bet for older computers, but with frame grabs and scaling up, you won’t be able to read much on the screen shots.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media Inc.
Video Production and Post
Owner/President/Editor/Designer/Animator -
Cheers guys.
Sorry Rich, by screen capture I meant video capture so I don’t think PDF would be suitable.
MPEG-1 doesn’t give you any frame size options in Compressor though, just a Web/DVD option.Are there any free codecs that give flexibility or is this the nature of the MPEG-1 format?
Thanks for your help
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MPEG-1 goes up to 4000×4000 just that most transcoders don’t offer that.
If you know what you are doing you can try editing the compressor setting itself in TextEdit, it’s not that difficult. Find the settings in /library/application support/compressor/
__________________________________________________________________
“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”
Steve Ballmer To USA Today: 30 April 2007“We and Apple are neck and neck and we’re chasing the two
other players,”
Steve Ballmer, referring to Nokia and Research in Motion. October 6th 2009
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