Video Compression

I don't claim to have any expertise in video.
That said, I had a client who sent me a 4.4MB .MPG file last week, and asked for it to be put up on his website.
Well, I knew it was a big file, but hey, people have big bandwidths these days. Let's just put it up...

It looked fine on my Mac, on all browsers: Safari, IE, Netscape & Firefox.
It looked fine on my PC.

My client gets back to me, and says that it's really jumpy on his computer. Dick reports the same results from his work PC.

Okay, let's just shrink the size down.

I ask my client if he's able to do it on his end. He's not.
Okay, not problem. I'm a professional. I bought Quicktime Pro.

Turns out, there's no easy way to shrink down/compress video in Quicktime Pro. I did find the export option, which did allow me to scale down the size of the video, but it did not include the soundtrack.

Time for the big guns.

I call Pete. Pete is in the video industry. Pete can help me.

Pete looks at everything (thank you, Pete) and comes to the same conclusion as I did: there's no easy way to do this.

Then, we found this on Apple's website:
“It is not possible to export the audio portion of a muxed MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 audio/video stream using QuickTime. For editing purposes, the entire MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 stream is treated as a single sample.”

Okay - that answers that.

So then, clever Pete starts to look on the web for some shareware that we could try. We try out several. None of them do the trick.....

Lucky for me, Pete found some old (as in Mac OS8.6.1 or later), unopened software that he had laying around. He offered to give to me, since he's never used it. It's an app that claims to be "The camera-to-web streaming solution". Yep! That's for me!

I installed it today, and (after about 5 tries) it does the job! yay!

I went from a 4.4MB .MPG file to a 792kb .mov file. Excellent.

That should do the trick. I've alerted my client to the change, and I hope that he sees the difference on his end as well.

This just shows that you never know when you're going to need and use that old software that you have laying around.

Pack-rats unite. ;)