sad but true

Friday, May 06, 2005

Why .mp4 Files And How To View Them

Categories: Site Updates

I am often asked why I chose the .mp4 format for the videos on my site.  I have a number of reasons for the decision. 

But first to make this long story short; download VLC and you should be able watch every video on this site.

The format is an open sourced one that is free to both encode in and decode in.  It also does not prevent a user from converting the format into another format (like .wmv attempts to do).  The encoding is of a higher quality than .mpg (a much more widespread open format) and thus for the same size file will typically look better.  Also the audio format for a .mp4 file is AAC the same format used for DVD videos.  It again is typically of a higher quality than a .mp3 of the same size.  This allows me to make the files smaller and save on bandwidth which is still considerable for a site like this.  As a Macintosh user DIVX (actually a .mp4 video file with .mp3 audio attached to it) encoded .avi files were not a good solution since they are difficult to play on Macs (though this is no longer the case it was at the time I started this site).  I didn’t want to use Quicktime (like I used for much earlier versions of the site) because it doesn’t work as well on Windows computers and the player is annoying since it nags you constantly to pay for the full version.

Long story short I chose the .mp4 format because the quailty is good, the price is cheap (free), and users would be free to convert the videos into other formats.

Things often sound better at first than they really are.  This turned out to be the case with .mp4 videos.  It turns out that Windows support for the open versions of .mp4 video is absolutely terrible.  While late versions of XP seem to have a .mp4 codec installed by default any earlier version of the Windows OS does not.  Mac support for .mp4 has been built into the OS for the last 6 or so years so it hadn’t occurred to me that the support was so bad on the Windows side. 

This has been a headache for some people and I apologize for that.  It wasn’t meant to be. 

That said, there is for most people, a very easy solution to the problem.  There is a free video player called vlc that can play .mp4 files perfectly.  It will run on nearly every OS be it Windows, Mac, Linux, or something you probably haven’t even heard of.  It plays the videos on this site just fine.  I hope that helps everyone out. 

For those of you on Macs that want to put the videos onto a DVD or convert them into another format.  Drag one of the videos onto iDVD or open it in QuickTime (Pro Version) and you can convert them into anything you want. 

On a PC you have to use a free encoding system called ffmpeg which is sadly not as easy to use as the Mac solutions.  In fact I can’t help you out as I’ve never successfully used it myself. 

I have actually already converted most of the videos into a DVD that I would be happy to offer people should you want it.  I would only ask for the cost of the blank disc and shipping to be paid.  Let me know through the contact form if you are interested in this and we will try to work something out.  I know I have had people express interest in something like this before.

I’m done with the Nerdery now.  Thanks for listening if you made it that far.  :)

Enjoy the videos.

Links:
VLC Website
FFMPEG Website

Posted by Jamie at 08:28 PM