Its not so much to do with mac snobbery, but mostly about a good balance between quality and filesize, although itunes and ipod compatibility are a factor too. Mac snobbery is part of the reason that wmv format is unloved, though windows users have others reasons not be care for wmv much too.
Apple did push h.264 quite early on, and as their software & devices support it, whilst microsoft prefers too push its own formats, some users, espeially windows ones, are given the impression that this mp4 and h264 stuff is all about quicktime. In reality there are many other ways to encode and play h264 on Windows and other OS's. But they may sometimes fly under the radar, and may occasionally cause some issues if you want your h264 to work right with ipods, iphones or whatever. Actually thats quite a big issue if you look to closely at the detail, because there is not just one sort of h264 file that is universally compatible with everything, different profiles and resolutions wor with different devices. This is probably a bit better now than a few years back, most prtobably dont worry about it, and just offer their video in 1 or 2 h264 versions at most. Also bear in mind that flash can now play h264 files, so its becoming more normal for this to be the format that is played in peoples browsers (with quicktime nowhere in sight). You can put h264 fiels inside a mov but its better for overall compatibility to make .mp4 files instead. Quicktime can do either, most other apps probably just do .mp4. Apple confuse things further by using the extension .m4v but this is really the same as .mp4, and can be renamed manually for greater compatibility. I had a quick look at the spec for Vegas 9. It supports several different types of h264 export. But being Sony they might refer to h264 as AVC instead, its the same thing really. Just another bit of unnecessary confusion to top things off! Anyway its nowhere near as complicated as my post might suggest, as long as you dont get caught up trying to make it compatible with everything. Hopefully Vegas's own export will work OK for your needs, because having to render to an intermediate format is certainly a pain in terms of lost time & quality. What format do you encode to presently? Although h264 is the norm and has some advantages, its not absolutely essential just yet. Older mpeg4 is still ok. A lot of these issues have been hidden behind flash's dominance of browser video in recent years, people didnt need to care unless they were offering podcast-like downloadable versions of their videos through itunes etc, although now the flash-based video hosts are upping their quality, it becomes an issue again as its probably best to upload h264 to such hosts for best quality results. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, "RatbagMedia" <ratbagra...@...> wrote: > > I own up to a lot of confusion. > > When you follow the dictates of various videoblogging expertise the > h.264 codec is a standard recommendation. Not h.263 or just MPEG.4 but > it has to be the Real McCoy. > > Assuming that's correct I have a couple of questions: > > (1) Can a file only be rendered to h.264 by using QuickTime Pro? > > (2) Since I edit in Sony Vegas (Platinum 9.0)I have to render my video > file in SV first BEFORE processing it in QuickTime. So what is the > best format to render the file in Sony Vegas (or some other video > editor) before importing it into Quicktime for exporting as .mov? > > (3) Mac snobbery aside, since I render a file twice, this seems a lot > of extra effort and lot more time for the sake of image quality and > iTunes download options. > > dave riley >
