Slashdot Mirror
Searching for a Realistic MPEG-4 Solution?
gmezero asks: "Over the last year I have been listening to the trumpet of MPEG-4 being sounded, and I am eager to take up the charge and implement it within my company for our corporate communications. In the past we have used MPEG-1 because to it's commonality. However, due primarily to size limitations (among many other issues that have evolved over the last year), I am getting pressure to move us to WMV for it's perceived 'compatibility' as all of our staff have Media Player on their systems. Unfortunately, nobody seems to realize the fact that WMVs may be Media Player version dependent as well and lock us into future upgrade issues. I can not demand for our GIS group to roll out a stand alone player (eg: DIVX), and I am getting down to a deadline of next week to finalize this platform selection. My pitch to sell MPEG-4 within my company boils down to one major issue, and that brings me to my question. How do I create a MPEG-4 file that will be player independent, short of the player pulling down a new codec for their existing installed media player (QT, WMP, Real)?"
I recommend purchasing QuickTime Pro and converting your files to H.264 (MPEG-4 part 10). It's a standard and provides wonderful quality for fast-moving transitions. Also, once you move to a QuickTime container, you'll be able to move to future formats without a problem in the future using QuickTime Pro (I have old videos from a camera that Mplayer can't even decode). QuickTime player is also free of charge and Linux users can use Mplayer.
However if you want to generate "plain plain" MPEG4, then you can have ffmpeg do it. You can get it from Sourceforge. Just make sure to specify an output file with ".mp4" extension.
Variants of MPEG4 are DIVX, XVID, MSMPEG4 and I think H.264. In some cases they are competely interchangeable for playback if you change the FOURCC tag at the beginning of an AVI file, for instance. You caan do this with transcode's "avifix -F" command. Many players react badly to "MP4" tagged AVI files for some reason, yet all of them apparently have no problem with "DX50" (which is DIVX) so I often change those MP4 AVI files to DX50.
While MPEG-4 is cool and all, don't forget that in many cases you have to pay royalties to use it. This is often above and beyond what you paid for the encoder and the player. The MPEG-4 codec is covered by patents and is NOT public domain.
WMV is not (currently) subject to any content royalties as long as you're using a licensed encoder and player. And it comes pre-installed with Media Player 9 or later, and is available for earlier players in a simple codec pack.
OGG is probably free of all royalties, but comes with its own installation and distribution complexities.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
can play mp4 out of the box. Just remeber to tag your files as FOURCC mp4v ( -vtag mp4v under ffmpeg ). You can also transcode .avi files to .mov with the -vocdec copy -vtag mp4v -acodec copy -f mov under ffmpeg as well.