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Video, Encoding and Macs

nateomedia Member
in General support
I've been searching for the answers to a couple of video related questions and I just can't find them, so I'm hoping someone here might be able to help.

1. I tried uploading MOV files to Zenphoto and they all default to 640px wide in the <object> code. The movies are not 640px wide. Can I fix this?

2. I tried using flowplayer, flowplayer3 and flvplayer with a mp4 file I encoded. It wouldn't display. I also got the message to "get flash" when enabling flowplayer or flvplayer. I have flash. Is this a problem with my mp4 encoding? I tried a bunch of different settings — can someone point me to settings that work?

If someone can answer question #1, I don't care about question #2.

Thanks a lot!

Comments

  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    1. In 1.2.6 the quicktime width/height is hardcoded in the class-video plugin. The 1.2.7 release scheduled today lets you set these values via the backend. Although we recommend to use the video players as not everyone might have quicktime installed.

    2. You also need to enable the class-video plugin. This is needed to get multimedia support in general. Without more details I can't say whay the players do not load.
  • olihar Member
    I would recommend to encode to .flv files. It seems most online flash players like that file format the best.

    I use Sorenson Squeeze to encode, super fast and good quality.

    And I do agree with Malte on the point that not everyone has quick time, but as far as I know 97% of internet users have flash.
  • nateomedia Member
    While it's a good point that not everyone has Quicktime, everyone that I want to show videos to does have Quicktime. I'm working on a portfolio site for my artwork and anyone I want to work with is going to be a Mac user. It's just the nature of the industry. I'm not opposed to encoding in H.264 or flv but, if it's going to be a big pain to get it to work, then Quicktime will get the job done and I can move on to other things. :)

    I did have class-video and either flowplayer/flowplayer3/flvplayer turned on when I was trying to get the mp4 files to work. Sorry for not mentioning that.

    I will give 1.2.7 a try — maybe that will solve all my problems. :)
  • acrylian Administrator, Developer
    If you know that your visitors are all on Mac then that is of course valid way to go. Here in Europe you can never be sure.

    Regarding mp4s the players are sometimes a little picky about the encoding details. But that should cause the video not to load not the player itself.
  • nateomedia Member
    Okay, so I figured it out. The problem with the video players was user error (whoops!), but I'll post what I did to get things working to save some frustration for future users. :)

    My big problem was my custom theme that hooks into my Wordpress install. If you're using a Wordpress header, you need to make sure that you have this line in your Wordpress header.php file:

    `<?php if (function_exists('zenJavascript')) zenJavascript(); ?>`

    As far as video encoding goes, I tried FLV but I couldn't get the files to come out looking very good. I ended up having really good results on my Mac by doing the following:

    1. Output the video files at high resolution from [insert fancy program here — I was using After Effects] as MOV files.
    2. "Export" the files using Quicktime Pro to scale down the files to the correct size but leave the files as a MOV files — I did not have good luck using Quicktime Pro to make mp4s. QP seemed to wash out the color from the files.
    3. Open the exported files in Handbrake and set the video settings to h.264, 700kbps, 2-pass encoding, turbo first pass.

    This gave me really small, beautiful looking files. I hope this helps someone else. :)

    EDIT: Oh, and when you change the preferences for the flowplayer3 video size, make sure you add 25px to the height to account for the video player control bar.
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