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OK I get it now… why the video ipod doesn’t play h.264

I’m making an educated guess that the reason none of my vidcasts encoded with h.264 do not work on the video ipod is because the cpu in the vidpod cannot handle that much processing.

I’ve been going insane trying to figure this out. Why do my friend’s videos which were encoded in 3ivx work but my h.264 quicktime encoded videos not play on the videopod?

Then I looked at how apples own vids are encoded and it’s using mpeg4 not h.264. There can be no other reason that I can think of.

So now I have to re-encode all of my shit because Apple is retarded.

By Madge

Lesbian with food allergies.

14 replies on “OK I get it now… why the video ipod doesn’t play h.264”

Madge, I found these specs on a review of the new iPod:

H.264 video: up to 768 Kbps, 320×240, 30 frames per sec., Baseline Profile up to Level 1.3 with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats

MPEG-4 video: up to 2.5 mbps, 480×480, 30 frames per sec., Simple Profile with AAC-LC up to 160 Kbps, 48 Khz, stereo audio in .m4v, .mp4 and .mov file formats

It looks like it can do h264, sort of.

Melissa- I’m familiar with the spec but the problem is that the h.264 portion just isn’t true! Those specs don’t work on iPod.

Anyway- nice mention on curry’s show today!

Hi Madge,

From Today’s email from the MPEG Industry Forum, which opens:

Dear MPEGIF News Readers,

We have had quite an eventful few last weeks and months.

Most notably, the video version of the almost already legendary iPod was launched by Apple – playing back MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 files. For the whole industry this is excellent news and I am sure we will see many more MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 enabled CE devices launch in the next few months.

The issue is that MPEG 4 AVC has a few profiles, baseline, main, and high, according to the quoted specs the decoder in the iPod can only decode anything upto the baseline profile, and nothing beyond. So, what profile are you using?

Yes, but that does not encode using h.264. Apple doesn’t even use it’s own codec. That’s what I’m trying to say. I can get mpeg4 to work but not the h.264 variant.

Unfortunately I don’t have enough practicle knowledge of the ipod or quicktime, as I only play and do not encode video myself. The codec info displayed in the player is the same for this new mild rant video as for some of the previous video’s.

They don’t use their own codec? Apple has been a long-time participant in the MPEG 4 standard development groups, but you say they are outsourcing their codec, who are they getting it from? I read on a h.264 developers list (no I am not developing codecs) that some Russian university is currently comparing a number of h.264 codecs. As from what I have seen the various codecs perform differently, some blurr backgrounds, some blurr motion, some start to turn to blocks if they need to compress too hard, and some therefor provide a somewhat better picture, and the codec that works best at 512 Kbit/s may work slightly less than another codec which performs best at 1 Mbit/s.

I’m having similar problems Madge, but I’m told within QTPro7 export settings there is a “movie to ipod” setting ? I can’t find it, can anyone see this or do I need to trash my preferences and reinstall ? I’m using latest update 7.03 ? any ideas, I don’t really want to reinstall if I don’t have to.

Hi Madge,

Does this one http://mp3.dailysourcecode.podshow.com/DSCV-01-2005-10-23.m4v by the Mr. Adams Currys work on your Ipod?

I checked some other codec vendor’s websites, but the one only used High profile. Try the http://www.avc-lliance.org site they have some samples as well, but it doesn’t say which profile they used.

I compared the file info of your qt7 .mov vids and that of the curry condo, and the condo codec is identified as avc1 and mp4a for the audio while the codec on your vid is identified as mp4v and mp4a for the audio.

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