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Quicktime movie plays on Windows but not on Mac

MacFan25863

MacFan25863

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 20, 2004
557
0
Hi everyone,

I have a video that I made. It is a .mov file. It plays flawlessly on Quicktime player in Windows, however, on my mac, it plays with artifacts all ovr and stalls constantly. It plays fine in VLC, but I want to import it into iMovie to use, and since iMovie is based off Quicktime, it is messed up there, too. Any ideas?
 
JeDiBoYTJ said:
im gonna ask the obvious.... is the mac's quicktime up to date?
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Yup, and even if it wasn't, it should still be able to play the file.
 
stoid said:
How did you make this movie, can you convert it to a different format?
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I made it into Adobe After Effects. I would like to keep it in the format it is in now because I don't want to loose quality.
 
MacFan25863 said:
Hi everyone,

I have a video that I made. It is a .mov file. It plays flawlessly on Quicktime player in Windows, however, on my mac, it plays with artifacts all ovr and stalls constantly. It plays fine in VLC, but I want to import it into iMovie to use, and since iMovie is based off Quicktime, it is messed up there, too. Any ideas?
Click to expand...
There are certain QuickTime codecs that available only on Windows. So what you describe is certainly possible. Knowing nothing about your file, I have no idea if your problem is a missing codec or not.

My recommendation: Just because Apple doesn't support a format doesn't mean that there is no QuickTime codec for it. While playing your .mov on Windows, select Windows > Show Movie Info. This will show you the audio and video formats are used by the video. Google these formats for Macintosh QuickTime codecs. If you find one, download and install it.
 
MisterMe said:
There are certain QuickTime codecs that available only on Windows. So what you describe is certainly possible. Knowing nothing about your file, I have no idea if your problem is a missing codec or not.

My recommendation: Just because Apple doesn't support a format doesn't mean that there is no QuickTime codec for it. While playing your .mov on Windows, select Windows > Show Movie Info. This will show you the audio and video formats are used by the video. Google these formats for Macintosh QuickTime codecs. If you find one, download and install it.
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The codec is MPEG-4. I have that on my mac.
 
MacFan25863 said:
The codec is MPEG-4. I have that on my mac.
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Horrortaxi is correct. The thing is that Apple's MPEG-4 codec is the standard for MPEG-4. DivX is based on Microsoft's failed draft of MPEG-4. Download and install both the DivX codec and the competing 3ivx codec. DivX supports the video and audio of these b@stard files. 3ivx supports the video of both of standard MPEG-4 and DivX variations. However, 3ivx may not support the audio. Together, the two codecs should give you full support for most non-WMV multimedia files concocted by Windows users. FWIW, installing more than one QuickTime codec to support the same file format does not cause a problem.
 
I have both 3ivx and Divx installed on my computer, still the same thing. However, the video does open in Final Cut Pro. When I export it, though, in a different format, such as DV, I still get the artifacts. I don't have any other Codecs installed on my PC than I have on my Mac, or at least any I can remember installing.
 
MacFan25863 said:
I have both 3ivx and Divx installed on my computer, still the same thing. However, the video does open in Final Cut Pro. When I export it, though, in a different format, such as DV, I still get the artifacts. I don't have any other Codecs installed on my PC than I have on my Mac, or at least any I can remember installing.
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A few obvious questions:
  1. Which Windows application did you use to create the video?
  2. What is the video's frame rate?
  3. Which model camera, if any, did you use for the cinematography?
 
MisterMe said:
A few obvious questions:
  1. Which Windows application did you use to create the video?
  2. What is the video's frame rate?
  3. Which model camera, if any, did you use for the cinematography?
Click to expand...

Adobe After Effects
29.97
None, its CG made with Blender 3D
 
I decided to take another shot at this today, but I'm still having the same problem. VLC plays the clip flawlessly, but as soon as I open it in FCP, iMovie or Quicktime I get pixilated artifacts and the like. VLC says the codec is mp4v.

Anyone wanna take a gander?

Sean


PS: In FCP, the video looks fine Frame-by-frame.
 
If it looks fine in the frame-by-frame, it might be some crazy problem with the real-time temporal decompression. Try exporting an image sequence from FCP, and you can always piece the images back together if they are not messed up.
 
stoid said:
If it looks fine in the frame-by-frame, it might be some crazy problem with the real-time temporal decompression. Try exporting an image sequence from FCP, and you can always piece the images back together if they are not messed up.
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Ok, I did that, and they look fine. Only problem is that its almost 10,000 images. When I try to load them back into FCP, my computer locks up. I loaded a small segment (50) of them, and they look fine, except for the fact that each frame was 10 seconds long.
 
If you're gonna edit it more, it would probably be best to not compress the video at all, even into the highest mpeg-4 setting. Then when you import it into iMovie or FCP you will have the best quality possible. Also if you're on a network, you can set up After Effects to do a distributed render, which will result in an image sequence, which you can then do what I suggest below)... just thought I'd let you know in case you weren't aware.

Anyway, when importing an image sqequence, what I'd do is open QuickTime Player, and choose "Import Image Sequence", then make sure for the Image Sequence settings that pop up, you choose the correct frame rate (probably 29.97 frames per second). Then choose "Save", and select "Make movie self-contained" so you can move it around on your hard drive and delete the image sequence files (notice no compression is happening in that process). Now you can easily import it into whichever program you choose.
 
Ok, I did what you said, and the video still turns out artifacted (though each images is fine when viewed alone). I don't really have the option of going back and rerendering because I am basically out of hard disk space on both my After Effects PC and my mac, and I don't have the cash to buy a new drive, because I'm trying to save up for college (4 more years...I'm gonna need all the cash I can get....which is now around 8 dollars...)
 
MacFan25863 said:
Ok, I did what you said, and the video still turns out artifacted (though each images is fine when viewed alone). I don't really have the option of going back and rerendering because I am basically out of hard disk space on both my After Effects PC and my mac, and I don't have the cash to buy a new drive, because I'm trying to save up for college (4 more years...I'm gonna need all the cash I can get....which is now around 8 dollars...)
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hmmm.... make sure it is rendered when playing it back on the mac. If you're using iMovie it does it automatically (I believe there is a little progress bar that shows it's rendering), if you're using FCP, it is supposed to automatically render, but I have seen times where it didn't for some odd reason. So make sure that there aren't any red lines above the video files in your timeline.

And if rendering is not the problem, then try exporting a segment of the video after you edited it, and see if you still have the artifacts.
 
Yeah, Quicktime does that funky stuff for some odd reason. I had the same problem once when I had a file encoded b iMovie. But I found out that VLC played the file on my friend's Windows computer perfectly.

I like VLC more than Quicktime, it plays almost everything. And, VLC is free!

I've had other problems with iMovie, too, like with the sound not syncing, and other things (I haven't tried the new iLife stuff, so I don't know if that version of iMovie works better or not). I've been thinking that Final Cut would be a better choice, it just costs money. Something I don't have much of at the moment. :(

I also found that when encoding VOBs to AVIs using Handbrake, it the files don't play well on Quicktime in Windows, but it works great in VLC for Windows (and Mac).

good luck,

--nate :)
 
oaklandbum said:
hmmm.... make sure it is rendered when playing it back on the mac. If you're using iMovie it does it automatically (I believe there is a little progress bar that shows it's rendering), if you're using FCP, it is supposed to automatically render, but I have seen times where it didn't for some odd reason. So make sure that there aren't any red lines above the video files in your timeline.

And if rendering is not the problem, then try exporting a segment of the video after you edited it, and see if you still have the artifacts.
Click to expand...

It's not the rendering, because I rendered it to create the mov file on my PC. I brought it over to the mac, which is where the artifacts occur, even when using Quicktime to just play it.

If I export it to a different file type like dv, I get the same problem.


Is there a way to export all the codecs used in VLC into Quicktime?
 
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