Does QuickTime support H.264 'High Profile'?

[RemarkabLee]

As the title says...

... I have a bunch of video files in the MP4 container format and according to the person who encoded them, they were all encoded in H.264 'High' Profile.

The video plays fine using QuickTime player, but by looking at the into palette withing QuickTime, the video track data size & data rate reported by QuickTime is reporting the file size as ZERO bytes. Same deal when viewing the info palette from MPEG StreamClip (which I believe uses QuickTime API as well).

So if I attempt to transcode the video files into Apple TV friendly format (which apparently only supports 'Main' profile H.264) I get no video. It seems anything that uses the QuickTime API cannot deal with this video track - but oddly enough plays it okay, it just can't use it for manipulation?

I wondered initially if this was a problem with the authors workflow and producing a slightly corrupt file header, but I'm starting to get the impression that fundamentally this is a limitation of QuickTime itself not supporting the High profile...

Many thanks for any information.


L.

 

[Nermal]

Interesting… I haven't even had a High Profile video play at all in QuickTime. Could you please try to open it in VLC and get its FourCC (Cmd-I > Advanced Information > Stream 0 > Codec)?

 

[spacepower7]

Profiles

I am interested in learning more about all these H.264 profiles but its annoying. Not a one size fits all like mpeg-2.

Anyway, for Nermal

I can play High@5.1 profile fine in Quicktime and iTunes. Maybe it is the perian plug-in playing it?

Though VLC can play the video, it doesn't play the sound in this file.
VLC
Stream 0 Codec avc1
Stream 1 Codec ac-3 (which for some reason won't play back.)

Neither iPhones nor AppleTV will play it.

any thoughts?

 

[Nermal]

avc1, that's the same code that I'm using for my files. The software that I was using (avc2avi on Windows) defaulted to h264 but I manually changed it to avc1 since that's what iPod-format .m4v files use.

What container (extension) do your files use? As you could probably guess from avc2avi, mine are .avi files.

I don't have Perian, so I'll give that a go and see what happens.

 

[dolphin842]

I have a feeling that it is indeed Perian that's providing the magic for QuickTime, at least on my end for these types of files (i.e. avc1 '0 byte' files that play fine). It's a shame that Apple doesn't appear to support the 'high' profile natively, as some of these videos look leaps and bounds above what normal h264 is capable of.

 

[Nermal]

I've installed Perian and they still don't play.