I recently was sent a link to a movie file in someone’s dropbox via email. No matter what I did I couldn’t get it to download. Safari wanted to play it. To download the movie I needed to click in the safari address bar, paste the link, and then press option-return which downloaded the movie instead of playing it.

I was sent a link in my email like this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/blah/blah/filename.m4v

When I clicked on the link, it just opened the movie in Safari.

If I tried  ’Save As’ from Safari I got an error saying “The document could not be exported. ”

When I right clicked on the link in my email and selected ‘Download Linked File’ nothing happens.

Finally I clicked in the safari Address bar after the link address and pressed ‘option-return’ and the movie downloaded to my safari downloads folder. A little strange -this should be simpler – but a google search revealed others are having similar problems:

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=15330

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=15560

I was recently given a keynote presentation which contained a movie. When I played the presentation the sound worked but the movie was blank. It turned out the movie was not in a format that Quicktime could play and it turns out there are many such formats. When I tried to play the movie in Quicktime I got an error saying ‘The document could not be opened. The movie is not in a format that QuickTime Player understands.You may need to install additional software to open this type of file.’ The tell me more option was next to useless, but there is a solution.

Perian is a handy free program that allows your mac to play almost any movie format including AVI files from a Windows computer. In fact it claims to play all the following movie formats: AVI, DIVX, FLV, MKV, GVI, VP6, and VFW, MS-MPEG4 v1 & v2, DivX, 3ivx, H.264, Sorenson H.263, FLV/Sorenson Spark, FSV1, VP6, H263i, VP3, HuffYUV, FFVHuff, MPEG1 & MPEG2 Video, Fraps, Snow, NuppelVideo, Techsmith Screen Capture and DosBox Capture.

You can download it for free from perian.org.

Then simply click on the icon and it will install itself as a Preference Pane. It sits in the background – you don’t need to do anything. Your normal programs such as keynote and quicktime will now be able to play any movie format.

What you may notice is that perian WON’T play wmv files. To play WMV files try out VLC for Mac OS X.

You’ve just gotta love the new iMovie 11 – It comes with built in movie trailers as themes!

It also has some much needed features like slow motion and fast forward and it looks like Apple have fixed up the audio editing.  I’m loooking forward to trying it out – it might be time to ditch iMovie HD. What have others found?

Anyway, here’s how to make a trailer:

In iMovie just go to File: New Project and pick a Movie Trailer Theme.

Go through the text boxes and fill them in. When you hit a movie placeholder box select some movie from your movie library down the bottom pane.

Fill it all in, then Preview it.

Back to your Project Library  and select Share Menu and post it straight to YouTube.

I wacked up this promo in a few minutes… the longest wait was uploading it!

I’ve had a few people ask me how I did the  screen casts for Dragon Dictate.  I used a program called iShowU HD.  It costs $29 and you can get it from here. You can also use it to turn a keynote presentation into a Quicktime movie and avoid the sync problems of Keynote’s built in export movie command.

There are a number of screen capture programs for the Macintosh, some of them are free, some of  then you pay for. I   trialled out a few including Snapzpro but ended up settling on iShowU HD as my favourite. You may want to try them both out – they have a free demo period.  I like iSHowU HD because it captures from Keynote, it captures movies from Apple’s DVD player, it captures sound as well as audio, you can set it to capture the full screen or just a part of it or a window, and it’s only $29.

One way that it can be quite useful is that it can convert a keynote presentation to a QuickTime movie.  For those of you who have tried to do this from within Keynote using the ‘export movie’  command you will know that when you export a keynote presentation the timing can be different from when you play it live, so if you have lots of transitions sequenced to a soundtrack, and you try to export from keynote, it can get out of sync. A way round this is to capture the output from keynote with iShowU HD  and then save it as a QuickTime movie. (I assume you could do this with PowerPoint as well)

How to capture a Keynote presentation to a Quicktime movie

To capture the audio from a program such as QuickTime, you need an extra program to use with iShowU HD.  This program is called Soundflower, and here is how to use sound flower with iShowU HD  to capture the output from an application such as keynote.

1.  Download Sound flower from here and install it.

2. Select Soundflower as your main audio output  in your sound system preferences so that all  sound output from your computer will go to soundflower.

Select Soundflower as the audio output

3. By default,  iShowU  records what is coming into your computer, for example from an external microphone.   If you are recording from an application like Keynote you need to tell it that that’s what you want to do. In iShowU HD select Record audio from applications. Also  select  Monitor audio  so that you can hear  what is being recorded.

Tell iShowU HD to record audio from an application

4.  Now you can choose which screen you want to record from,  open your keynote presentation, start iShowU recording, then  start your keynote presentation. When  the keynote presentation is finished,   press escape to exit,  find your way into iShowU HD  and tell it to stop recording. You  can then open your recording in QuickTime player X  and trim the start and end to give you your video.

You don’t need soundflower if you are just capturing audio from a microphone input like I was for the Dragon Dictate videos.

There are so many movies coming round in junk emails these days that you may be happy you cant’ play WMV files. But just in case you do need to actually look at one, here’s how.

There is a simple movie player called VLC that will download all kinds of movies, even ones that Quicktime can’t play. It’s not as good looking as Quicktime Player, but it can play Windows WMV files. You can download the latest version of VLC from here. Install it into your Applications folder, and then whenever you need to play a WMV movie, just right click (or control-click) on the movie and select ‘Open With’ – ‘VLC’


I have a lot of .mov files. Each file is about 1 hour of movie footage but compressed to only 200-300MB. When I import them into iMovie it tries to convert them to dv files. Do you know a way to burn a collection of .mov files to a dvd so that they can be read with a normal dvd player?

Good question, let me explain a little bit about what you can and can’t do with CDs and DVDs.

You can’t put .mov files on a DVD to watch on a normal DVD player, but you can put the on a CD as a VCD to watch on a normal DVD player!

There in only one kind of DVD movie format – DVD.  But people started putting videos onto CD’s because it was cheaper, this is called VCD. When VCD format started becoming popular, companies produced DVD players that could play VDC’s.
Notice that although VCD is video on a CD,it can be played on most DVD players, but not CD players.

There are three main ways of putting video on a CD, from oldest to newest…

1. VCD 352×240. 72 minutes on a 72 minute audio CD. Very popular and will play on most DVD players.
2. SVCD: 480×576, 60 minutes of good quality SVCD on a CD. Slightly less compatible than VCD but better quality.
3. DivX. The newest video codec becoming very popular. higher compression and quality, but least compatible only new ‘DivX Certified’ DVD players play them.

Summary:

• VCD is older and worst but most compatible.
• SVCD is in the middle.
• DivX is the newest and best but least compatible.

I did a trial. I had a 600 MB DV file. I made DVD, a VCD, a SVCD and a DivX CD
Here’s the sized the turned out at:

• DVD: 76MB
• SVCD: 49MB
• VCD:30MB
• DivX:6MB

Now for the test I put them all in my 1 year old LG DVD player, they all played except the DivX one.

DivX is quite reasonable at 624×352, 1200kbps, with MP3 Audio. This is better than TV quality, not quite DVD quality, but good to watch. 45 minutes of Boston Legal takes 350Mb.

Unfortunately you can’t make a VCD on a DVD. You can only put VCD on a CD.
If you want to store a lot of video on a DVD disk you can copy it onto the DVD as data, but it won’t play on a DVD player.

Therefore you may as well go for the best – DivX. You could get over 4 hours of DivX on a DVD.

How to make a VCD….

The best free program is called burn. Download Burn from here.

It does all the converting for you. Just run it, drag and drop the quicktime movie onto it, select the format you want (VCD, SVCD, DVD or DivX) and click burn!

Well, I’m on a bit of a run here with my new samsung D900 mobile phone, the latest being what are the best settings to compress a movie to watch on my phone. The phones resolution is 320×240, which I think is similar to an ipod. I use Handbrake to encode DVD’s, you can also use these settings to export from Quicktime pro, but Handbrake is free.

FILE FORMAT: MP4
CODECS: MPEG-4/AAC Audio

VIDEO:
OUTPUT: 320×240 You may need to CROP to get the aspect ratio right, for example, 150 or so pixels off each side, depending on the original. Just play with the crop settings till the picture looks OK and not stretched.
FRAMERATE: 15 frames per seconds (fps) (Normal framerate is 25fps, but it’s hard to notice this slower framerate except for panning which is a bit staggered.)
AVERAGE VIDEO BITRATE: 200kbps (Any lower and you start to notice a decrease in quality. I tested 850, 500, 300, 250, 150 and 100kbps.)
2-pass encoding
AUDIO:
FORMAT: AAC
BITRATE: 128kbps.  (At 96 I could notice a discernable decrease in audio quality.)

I saved this under a profile called ‘phone’ and it works well. A 2 hour movie takes about 12 hours to encode, but comes out at about 500MB and is almost perfect quality on the small screen.

Due to limitations in the QuickTime Architecture, AVI video files containing MP3, WMA or AC3 audio tracks will not play directly in QuickTime based applications. You may experience stuttering, loss of sound, no sound or an error message.

We have written a useful application called “DivX Doctor II” which can fix these problems, and other issues QuickTime has with AVI files. You can download DivX Doctor II from http://doctor.3ivx.com/.
Here is the direct link to the file:

http://www.3ivx.com/codec/DivXDoctorII2.2.sit

TO MAKE A PRESENTATION WITH NO SOUNDTRACK…
(eg song words for church, a slideshow that plays in the background at a birthday etc)

1. Get a macintosh, don’t waste time with a PC. Don’t use powerpoint unless you want to waste a lot of your time.

2. For a presentation that has plain slides and maybe 1 or two movies, keynote is good. It comes as part of iwork from Apple.

3. If you need to use lots of multimedia, or last minute flexibility to make changes, then ‘see’ may be better. (‘see’ is available from rwts.com.au – sign up for beta version under products – see)

TO MAKE A MOVIE WITH A SOUNDTRACK
(eg a video clip for a song)
To make a movie with words (stills) and pictures AND a soundtrack.

- imovie is easier than keynote, as the timings are MUCH easier, even if the final output is not as pretty (but you probably won’t notice the difference on the big screen)

• make all the lyrics as slides with keynote. Do it at 1024×768 resolution – set in inspector – document- slide size.
export from keynote as export-images-tiff.
• drag all these slides into imovie
• drag other stills (eg pictures) into imovie
• drag the song (music) into imovie timeline along the bottom.
• drag all the stills down to the timeline, they will be default to 5 seconds each.
• add transitions (eg select all then add transition cross dissolve)
• finally, starting at first still, listen to song, work out where still is meant to end, double click the still, change the duration of the still so that it ends where it is meant to. Do this progresively for all the stills.
• export as full quality.