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.

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.

1. Insert the DVD/CD into your drive.

2. Run the TERMINAL application (In your Appplications Utilities Folder)

You will get a little window with a prompt something this: Macintosh:~ wayne$

3.Type the following and then hit return:

drutil status

It will give you some info like this:

Vendor Product Rev
SONY DVD RW DW-U21A AADB

Type: DVD-R Name: /dev/disk2
Cur Write: 4x DVD Sessions: 1
Max Write: 4x DVD Tracks: 1

This is information about your DVD/CD drive and the important thing to notice is the name, it will be /dev/disk1 or /dev/disk2

4. If it is disk1 type this: (If the name is different (eg disk2) then just replace all the disk1 references with disk2.)

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

This will make the DVD icon disappear from the desktop.
5. Type the following:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=~/Desktop/file.iso bs=2048
6. Wait about 10 or 20 minutes while it now makes an image of the CD/DVD onto your desktop.

When it’s finished it will give a message like this:

2170784+0 records in
2170784+0 records out
4445765632 bytes transferred in 1335.111379 secs (3329884 bytes/sec)

7. Type this to make the DVD reappear on the desktop and you are done:

diskutil mountDisk /dev/disk1

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.

Here’s how I think I got it working, I tried a few things, this is what I think did it:

1. Downloaded FrontRowUpdate.dmg from apple web site, and copied FrontRowUpdate.mpkg from the disk image to the desktop.

2. Downloaded Enabler1.2.1.dmg and ran “Front Row Enabler” and selected “Enable Installation” which I believe hacks FrontRowUpdate that is on my desktop so it can be installed on any mac. (Before this step I tried installing FrontRowUpdate and it said you require a G5 something or other imac to install.)

3. Installed Front row by clicking on the new modified installer on my desktop. Restart.

3. Downloaded FRE.dmg and ran “Front Row Enabler” (this one has a nice icon and is diffferent to the above one) and then clicked the ‘install’ button. This I believe modifies some core services bezel file or something. Restart. DON”T DO THIS STEP EVER AGAIN or it can cause your menu to disappear or something like that.

4. Went to the system preferences and selected keyboard shortcuts in ‘mouse and keyboard’ preference pane and changed it from apple-escape to apple-F4. (Apple-escape clashes with Quicksilver)

5. Then I just programmed my ATI wonder remote so that when I press the TV button it presses apple-F4 and launches Front Row. I also had to set the button ‘C’ on my ATI wonder remote to be escape so I could exit from Front Row.

The Buttons that Control Front Row are right, left, return and escape.

There are good instructions here:
http://whenderson.blogspot.com/2006/03/installing-front-row-121-on-any-mac.html