To all you Mac users out there...have any problems watching wmv's?

[JDex]

Some will... Mac users can download the Windows Media Player for Mac, but most won't/don't... far more Windows users have QT.

You're best to provide both.

[BlueTide]

I am just in the process of uploading my videos to my website and my wmv's look a lot better than QT's of the same size. I just wanted to know if Mac users would have any problems watching the films? If anyone has any insight, that would be great.

There are differences between wmvs as well. Some don't work at all with my mac, not even by using MS:s Media player for Mac. Some work fine.

[enygma]

You could always give the H.264 codec a shot, or just play around with the good ol' Sorrenson 3. I found H.264 streams very well from the web.

[thethule]

Thanks for the replies. I think i will do what JDex suggests and have both on there. I am using Sorenson3, but i want to keep the file sizes as small as possible and Windows Media Format seems to do a better job with the same number of Mb. As for H.264 codec, i want to use something that most people are guaranteed to have, hence no DIVX either, which would have been my format of choice.

Thanks again.


Marc

[Beamtracer]

WMV is not cross platform.

Well, you can get the Win media player for both Win & Mac, but in the Mac version a lot of the most commonly used codecs are missing. It's a hobbled version on the Mac compared to the Win version.

There are always some Windows users who don't like Quicktime as well. But at least the main Quicktime video codecs that come with the free player are available on both platforms. In fact, I think all of them are...

eg...
Sorenson3
MPEG-4
H.264
etc etc

All the above codecs are 3rd party (non-Apple) codecs, but they exist on both the Mac & Win QT players.

[Mantat]

Well, think twice about H.264. Maybe not everyone can play it (its now availlable on windows), but anyone who can will take this format. So it will save you bandwidth (about 4 times less) or allow better image quality.

H.264 really worth it IMHO, I now encode everything with it!

Oh btw, its great that you think about mac users! I hate sites who only supply WMA files.

[Wintermute]

H.264 will require Quicktime 7 to view, and in my opinion is very much worth the upgrade. (free unless you want the pro version ($30)–you'll need the pro version to encode in H.264 I believe as well) I watched the WWDC keynote in QT7 using H.264, and it was by far the cleanest stream I've ever watched.

I'm with Mantat, thanks for considering us Mac users! :)

[Beamtracer]

H.264 will require Quicktime 7 to view
Not necessarily. More H.264 players are coming onto the scene from different vendors. It's still early days though, so the "masses" probably haven't yet downloaded a H.264 player yet.

I feel certain that H.264 will eventually become the most widely used codec of them all. Maybe like MP3 is to audio.

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