Quoting Thoralf Schulze thoralf_schulze@yahoo.de:
One thing bothers me: Apples MPEG4-Implementation is known to be rather inferior when compared to xvid etc. What codecs does quicktime actually support? And wouln't it be feasible to use a more open platform (like ffmpeg or theora) to do this? theora would have the added benefit of producing streaming video ... Then again, I don't know too much about OSX and even less about its multimedia framework, so don't feel bothered if I talk bs here.
MPEG4, Divx and the like are not suited for use with this object because they are designed as delivery and not production codecs. These do not perform well in real-time encodng and are so lossy you cannot really do any additional processing or editing with them afterwards. This object is designed to be used with uncompressed 4:2:2, JPEG (Photo and Motion), DVC PAL/NTSC and DVCPRO HD which are all suitable for further processing. The open source alternatives do not really offer the support for production video that Quicktime does. That being said, there will be no limitations on the Quicktime codecs available for use, so you can attempt to use distribution codecs if you wish.
I am working on a way to allow any installed Quicktime codec to be used with pix_record. This is more of a user interface problem to be solved than anything else. Right now I can dump a numbered list of codecs to the console and also store them in an array. The idea is that the user can select the codec by number and use that. The list looks like this:
pix_record : codec 0 Animation 1919706400 ctype 65670 pix_record : codec 1 BMP 1465011269 ctype 131253 pix_record : codec 2 Cinepak 1668704612 ctype 65710 pix_record : codec 3 Component Video 2037741106 ctype 65725 pix_record : codec 4DV - PAL 1685480304 ctype 65679 pix_record : codec 5 DV/DVCPRO - NTSC 1685480224 ctype 65678 ... pix_record : codec 27 Sorenson Video 3 1398165811 ctype 65721 pix_record : codec 28 Sorenson Video 1398165809 ctype 65719
Those numbers after the name are actually constants stored into the array which really tell QT what to use. It's a bit of a pain.
Also, as I mentioned in the first post, the standard Quicktime compression dialog does work by holding down the command key and selecting a compressor that way.
I could give it a go with Dev-Cpp (uses the MinGW port of the GNU utils), but that would have to wait until next week ...
I would wait if you are not familiar with the Quicktime API. The object features some non-standard ways of using the API which might cause problems on Windows (or even OSX as I haven't fully tested it).
cgc
---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.