MP4s and Quicktime Player

[egproductions]

In the past I have been hosting f4vs on my site and using a flash wrapper/player to play them. I want to start moving towards MP4s (h264) since it can load on iphones however I'm noticing that when I put an MP4 on my site, most browsers start using quicktime to play it back and the video is choppy like it cna't keep up with the frame rate. This doesn't happen to the same encoded file when viewed through a different player.

The other issue I'm having is that when I just want to put a link to the file most browsers won't download the file but rather open it up in a new browser window and attempt to play it (either with quicktime or another player). How do I get the file to ask the user if they would like to download it?

 

[JeganRX]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=128200

I've been struggling with this issue myself, because the specifics are hard to track down, but Quicktime has always had very lacking support for H.264 playback.

I don't know off-hand how YouTube chooses to encode its files (they are, however, certainly x264 encoded, and it would be trivial to find out the settings by reading the file hex), so I can't tell you precisely why, but it is most probable that YT uses more than one b-frame on their encodes... Which QT seems to choke on.

I'm not a web coder for the latter question, google is your friend! :thumbsup:

 

[egproductions]

I haven't had issues with youtube or vimeo encoded files on my PC or iphone since it isn't using quicktime player on the PC and the quicktime built into iphone seems to play x264 smoothly. My issue is with h.264 using quicktime player on a PC.

Are there any containers for x264 codecs that will play on an iphone but won't default to quicktime on a PC? Or can use a iphone compatible wrapper on a PC? I'm a little lost in trying to find an all around option.

 

[JeganRX]

Hmm, well I would not be surprised (particularly given Quicktime X's availability on OSX) if Quicktime had better functionality on Mac than Windows, but again, my ability to give you a proper answer is limited by my current knowledge of exactly what settings Quicktime can playback smoothly. iPhones seem to only accept MP4s or MOVs (for H.264 at least), so you're a bit stuck in that situation I'm afraid. A user can configure QT to NOT decode movies straight from a browser, but I'm not sure if this is avoidable in Safari (for obvious reasons).