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Home: Video University Forums: Mac Video:
.wmv versus QuickTime

dave phelan
Novice

Sep 23, 2005, 8:16 AM

Post #1 of 11 (2088 views)
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.wmv versus QuickTime	Can't Post

I am a teacher who has been working on a project with 7 other Irish schools on a multimedia project on the various aspects of the life and work of the Irish poet Patrick kavanagh, that will be terminating with a website hosted by the Irish department of education. All my project work was completed using iMovie. I handed over my finished movies as Quicktime clips. They were to be placed on the finished website for viewing. A few days ago I was given the address of the almost finished website and upon checking that my clips were showing up properly, saw that as I clicked on a movie it was showing up and downloaded as a .wmv streaming link. As I have downloaded the windows media viewer I could watch them but I would have preferred to have them coming in for viewing as QuickTime files.
I was wondering what the Mac community makes of this? Is this a problem that I should take up with the website. What are the reasons that a site uses .wmv streaming files instead of quicktime. Is .wmv a "better" file format than QT?
Any comments would be great. I suppose as a mac user I feel a bit cheated in seeing all my work coming up this way with the credit being possibly interpreted as windows based.
many thanks
Dave
ps as part of the project agreement I cannot publish the url until the website is fully ready.

RatVega
Enthusiast

Sep 24, 2005, 5:30 PM

Post #2 of 11 (2064 views)
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Re: [dave phelan] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

I understand your "pain", Dave...

I've always held the opinion that WMV files were of lower quality than QT, but in reality this is probably just simple prejudice. It is probable, however, that many prople encode WMV files at lower rates and make low quality clips in the name of file size.

I expect that the logic of the site is that the majority of the viewers will have WMV and so they encoded that way. I'd look at the clips and compare them to your QT clips to see if your work quality is being lost. Make sure to be objective in this - uncompressed QT files will always look better than either QT compressed files or WMV files.

The optimal way to present the work, IMHO, would be in H.264, but the site admin types will probably reject this as "too much, too soon." H.264 (MPEG-4, Layer 10, the HD-capable format) offers higher quality and lower file size than normal MPEG-4 (the de facto standard for web video), and is supported on both platforms - but only in recent releases.

Maybe you could add "Made on a Mac" to your credits or splash screen... :)

______________________________________________________________
Currently on a loaded 2.5GHz G5 dualie/5GB/1TB internal RAID/dual 19" monitors. Final Cut Studio, Adobe Suite, Boris RED. Shooting with Canon.

VU California Crew, Inland Empire Sub-Chapter (paragraph?)

dave phelan
Novice

Sep 24, 2005, 7:02 PM

Post #3 of 11 (2060 views)
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Re: [RatVega] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

Thanks for the reply, I should have done what you suggested but as the Department of education requested the files in Quicktime and have even put links to Apple's Quicktime player download page I did not think it necessary. I will have a good look at the quality but as I have the original QT clips on the hard drive and the clips on the web are streaming clips which can be viewed online as .wmv files a comparison would not really be possible I would think????
My own clips I would think must be better quality than streamed ones.
thanks Dave

In Reply To

Brian Dorr
Enthusiast

Sep 25, 2005, 7:26 PM

Post #4 of 11 (2040 views)
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Re: [dave phelan] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

Hi Dave,

Ideally, having both formats available for viewing on your website would be the best option.

I've been using QT7 (best image quality, larger viewer, and smaller file size) but have had a few PC users say that after downloading the free QT7 player they've had some problems viewing (Problem is on their end with a Windows conflict but there is a work-around - but a little complicated).

So I'm going to add some WMV clips for the PC users. I'm using Flip4Mac to covert the QT files to WMV (http://www.flip4mac.com).

Apple says this about their QT player:

Massive Cross-platform Platform
When you distribute your media in QuickTime, you automatically gain access to a massive platform. Available for both Windows and Mac, QuickTime 6 was downloaded more than 350 million times. Moreover 98% of those downloads were from PC users, at a rate of over 10 million per month. QuickTime offers a mature platform with thousands of professional and consumer authoring applications.

As a consumer, I don't like streaming media. Your're held hostage to the bandwidth traffic. If it drops your video it interrupted unti it re-buffers. I have "Fast Start" clips on my site that start playing as soon as their is enough info to play without stoppage.

Good luck!
Smile

Save lives full time - film them part time.

mmlips
User

Sep 26, 2005, 11:49 PM

Post #5 of 11 (2016 views)
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Re: [Brian Dorr] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

I changed all my on-line demos to Flash FLV's. I never have to worry about which platform to encode for al all and in my opinion the FLV's look superior to platforms.

Mark

-----------------------------------
V.U. California Crew, L.A. Chapter
http://www.ifvproductions.com
"Because Life Doesn't Stand Still"
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ourweddingvideo
User

Sep 27, 2005, 12:27 PM

Post #6 of 11 (1987 views)
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Re: [mmlips] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

The problem with flash is it has to front load before it plays and if you can't add a play bar, than this becomes a problem for the end user.

mmlips
User

Sep 27, 2005, 12:39 PM

Post #7 of 11 (1984 views)
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Re: [ourweddingvideo] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

Flash progressively loads just like OT or WMV files, once enough of the video has downloaded to begin playback. Unless you are using true streaming servers this is true of both QT & WMV files. And, I can jump to any part of the FLV using the play bar and the file will play from that position. Also I can't think of an instance we I could NOT add a play bar. Flash video components are extremely easy to set up.

-----------------------------------
V.U. California Crew, L.A. Chapter
http://www.ifvproductions.com
"Because Life Doesn't Stand Still"
----------------------------------

ourweddingvideo
User

Sep 27, 2005, 1:08 PM

Post #8 of 11 (1979 views)
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Re: [mmlips] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

I'll have to take your word on that because flash is so slow to encode a QT file I don't have have time to wait for it to finish. I did go to your site though and saw your gallery page, saw the play bar I wonder if that was a third party plugin or did that feature come with flash.

mmlips
User

Sep 27, 2005, 1:55 PM

Post #9 of 11 (1976 views)
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Re: [ourweddingvideo] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

It's a feature in Flash 7 pro & 8. I'm wondering from your last comment are you thinking of embedding QT files into a flash file? That's a totally different animal. What is on our website are FLV's which are flash based encodes, totally different from the QT or WMV format. In other words I take a QT file and encode it to FLV not the other way around. If you already know all that I apologize. I was a little confused by your comment about Flash taking forever to encode a QT file. Smile

-----------------------------------
V.U. California Crew, L.A. Chapter
http://www.ifvproductions.com
"Because Life Doesn't Stand Still"
----------------------------------

VidMan
Veteran

Nov 10, 2005, 1:04 PM

Post #10 of 11 (1519 views)
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Re: [mmlips] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

Old topic here, but what software do you use to create the FLVs? Are you doing it in Macromedia Flash itself? I am looking for a good app that I can drop my video into and let it make the files...

Brian
______________________________________________
VU Virginia Chapter

mmlips
User

Nov 10, 2005, 1:27 PM

Post #11 of 11 (1516 views)
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Re: [VidMan] .wmv versus QuickTime [In reply to]	Can't Post

I'm still in Flash MX 2004 Pro and using Sorenson Squeez to create the FLV's. I'm not sure but I think the newer version of Flash has some greatly updated video goodies including a new codec for creating the compressed FLV's.

Mark
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-----------------------------------
V.U. California Crew, L.A. Chapter
http://www.ifvproductions.com
"Because Life Doesn't Stand Still"
----------------------------------