[MPlayer-users] Best quality universal format?...

[Steven M. Schultz]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2004, Paul Simpson wrote:

> Hmmm - I'm pretty sure that the PC people will have quicktime  installed.

	Not really - at least not by default.   I sent a .mp4 file to a 
	windoze user and they weren't able to play it.  Rather than  talk 'em
	thru getting Quicktime+MPEG-4/whatever loaded/working I sent a 
	MPEG-1 version that played without trouble.

> Does that make it easier?  Is there a way to author a MPEG4 
> quicktime movie on linux?

	Of course - I've done it.   All you need is the .m4v file (not the
	.avi format that comes out of mencoder) and the audio file.  I use
	'mp4creator' (one of the utilities from the mpeg4ip project at
	http://mpeg4ip.sf.net thus:

mp4creator -c rhrh.m4v -rate=29.970 -H rhrh.mp4
mp4creator -c rhrh.aac -H -O rhrh.mp4

	Leave out the -H to save a little space used by the streaming hint
	track.

	The resulting file plays fine with Apple's quicktime player IF
	the userdata header is left out of the m4v stream (use the new
	lavcopts option "bit_exact" to suppress the userdata header which 
	appears to confound QT Player).

	To extract the raw .m4v stream from a .avi file produced by mencoder
	I use 'avi2raw' (another utility from mpeg4ip).  If you're using
	ffmpeg directly to do the encoding there's a way (the exact options
	I forget at the moment) to have it produce a .m4v file directly.

	For maximum interchange compatibility I author a DVD and send 'em a
	disc ;)

	Cheers,
	Steven Schultz