What specific settings should I use when converting video files for playback on older macs using quicktime 2.5?
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2012, November 11 - 12:51am
#1
Converting video files to play with old macs?
Comments
2012, November 11 - 2:36am
#2
I'm not sure what you mean by "video files". TV shows ? movies ? game video ?
QuickTime 2.5 is very dated, and the resolution and framerate will be very limited. Support for codecs will also be extremely limited, so forget about any advanced encoding codecs like H.264. Maybe even any codec offering compression will be a non-starter.
2012, November 11 - 10:26am
#3
And some extra questions. What Mac OS? 7.x - 9.2.2? What type of Mac? 68k? emulator/actual hardware? PPC? emulator/actual hardware?
2012, November 11 - 12:24pm
#4
In more detail I'd like to convert a video file, for example a music video in MP4 format to something viewable with QT2.5 I'm using Mac OS 7.5.5 on real PPC hardware.
2012, November 11 - 1:40pm
#5
I recently wrote a small application that displayed a QT movie as the background to a realtime wiring diagram. The wiring diagram would change to reflect the state of each circuit. The QT movie would play in a continuous loop as long as the application was running.
I digitized the movie as Photo-JPEG at 640x480 pixels with a frame rate of 30 fps.
This played fine on a G4 800 mhz machine. But when I moved it to its ultimate host (a Beige G3 desktop at 233 mhz) the best frame rate I could get out of it was 15 fps (intermittent) and 7 fps (sustained).
To get the full 30 fps rate out of the G3 I had to reduce the resolution to 320x240.
Gary
2012, November 12 - 4:00am
#6
One thing you can try is, if you have any existing QT .mov files, is to look at what compression was used to create them in the QT 2.5 Player app. The Player will give you details of a file in its menus.
For example, there is a good QT music video on the Mac OS 8.0 & OS 8.1 install CD, located in "CD Extras:QuickTime Sample", named "The Old Apartment - BNL". Its a good example, because its wide screen, a great track and its optimized for QT 2.5
Looking at the codec info for this track, it says that "Cinepak" was used.
2012, November 27 - 3:27am
#7
Using Sorenson Squeeze 7.0+ you can convert videos to the Sorenson Video 3 Codec.