Video codecs: iPhoto, iMovie HD, iMovie '08 and FLIP Video

As a part of my ongoing struggle with FLIP Video, I'm delving ever deeper into the broken world of Apple video.

iMovie '08, for example, recognizes some video formats when it's importing directly, but a smaller set when the video is stored in iPhoto. I even have an sneaking suspicion that my test results differ between my Intel MacBook and my PowerPC iMac.

The FLIP camcorder uses the 3ivx toolkit form MPEG-4 compression and playback, but it's a completely proprietary implementation. It can only be read with a 3ivx decode, so it's not what I want to keep video in.

So what format makes sense? I'd like something that

• is fairly standard
• is fast to edit
• doesn't use tons of disk space
• doesn't lose immense quality when it goes through edit cycles
• is recognized by iMovie '08 even when the video is stored in iPhoto
  

One option is Apple's Intermediate Codec (used by Final Cut, emphases mine):

Final Cut Pro 5: About HDV and the Apple Intermediate Codec:

... The Apple Intermediate Codec is a high-quality video codec that Apple developed for use as an alternative to native MPEG-2 HDV editing in an HDV workflow. Instead of editing the MPEG-2 HDV data directly, you can capture video from the tape source and then transcode it with the Apple Intermediate Codec to optimize the video data for playback performance and quality.

Working with the Apple Intermediate Codec is less processor-intensive than working with native HDV. Unlike MPEG-2 HDV, the Apple Intermediate Codec does not use temporal compression, so every frame can be decoded and displayed immediately without first decoding other frames. The drawback of this codec is that it requires three to four times as much bandwidth and hard drive storage space as MPEG-2 HDV.

Data rates for the Apple Intermediate Codec are variable; the data rates and storage needed may vary slightly, depending on the complexity of your footage. Images with a lot of detail have a higher data rate, while images with less detail have a lower data rate.

I did some experiments converting FLIP Video to MPEG-2 and Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC). On my MacBook iMovie '08 recognized the AIC encoded .mov files within iPhoto (you need to restart iMovie to get it to recognize new iPhoto additions):

• Original (3ivx): 3.6MB
• Apple Intermediate Codec with AAC encoding for audio: 14MB
• MPEG-2: highest quality, AAC audio - 15MB
  MPEG-2 "high quality" - 7 MB

So in my testing the MPEG highest quality was about the same size as the AIC file, but the MPEG-2 "high quality" was half the size. Both were fairly quick on a MacBook.

On my iMac, using QuickTime Pro, I wasn't able to find MPEG-2 as an option for export. I did find Apple Intermediate Codec and even on the old PowerPC machine the 3ivx to AIC conversion was pretty quick. The resulting file was "seen" by iMovie '08 even when it was stored in an iPhoto library.

So I guess for the moment I'm going to be transcoding to Apple Intermediate Codec. Problem is that QuickTime Pro doesn't do batch file export. More on that later ...

Update 12/25/08: This all largely obsolete when Apple finally updated iMovie HD so it will work with FLIP camcorders after you install the 3ivx files (at least on Intel machines).

In any case, I did come across more explanations of 3ivx and other video codecs in a well done Gizmodo review:

Okay, so all that stuff up there are industry-wide standard video codecs. On top of all of those, various entities love putting out their own spin on those standards. As we mentioned before, DivX (proprietary) and XviD (open source), for instance, use MPEG-4 Part 2 (more specifically, MPEG-4 ASP) compression, meaning stuff that'll natively play back MPEG-4 ASP will also play back DivX. Like the Xbox 360, for instance. There are a ton of MPEG-4 ASP-based codecs, actually, like FFmpeg, 3ivx and others, but DivX and XviD are the most common.

So 3ivx is a sibling of DivX. I wrote a later update on this topic.

Camino not working with Gmail

Camino has stopped working with Gmail. I assume the bug is well understood -- it's not obscure! The screen redraws constantly, never progressing beyond the first 20 pixels or so.

I tried upgrading to the new 1.6, but it has the same problem. I'm back to Firefox beta 3 for now. (Safari has never worked well with Google products, and it still doesn't.)

I'm surprised there's no fix yet.

Update 4/28/08: I followed the advice in comments; emptying the cache fixed the problem. It's funny, I used to empty the cache the first time I had browser problems, but it's been years since that did anything. I just lost the habit ...

Devon Technologies free OS X services - including WordService

I'm very surprised I haven't been using this free service app. DT lists several others worth looking at. All free. Thanks CT comments!

Needful Things: Services

WordService 2.7

This service provides 34 functions to convert, format, or speak the currently selected text, as well as insert data or show statistics of the selection within all Cocoa applications (such as TextEdit, Mail, iChat, Safari, XCode, or our commercial applications) and Carbon applications supporting services.

Features:

Reformat, Remove line attachments/endings/links/multiple spaces/multiple feeds/quotes, Trim line beginnings/line endings/lines, Sort lines ascending/descending, Shift left/right, Initial caps of words/sentences, All caps and lowercase, Mac/Windows/Unix line endings, Rotate 13, Straight/Smart Quotes, Encode/Decode tabs, Insert date/date and time/time/contents of path, Speak native/German text, Statistics.

Has Google heard of the Macintosh?

From a Google blog post on malware:

Official Google Blog: Working together to fight malware

... Use anti-virus software. Most anti-virus software is specifically designed to find and remove harmful software on your computer. Be sure you have anti-virus software installed on your computer (you can get a free trial through Google Pack if you don't), keep it current, and use it to run frequent full-system checks...

I don't know any OS X user running antivirus software; in any case it would cause far more problems than viruses have to date.

Clearly, someone needs to bring a Macintosh to Google's office. That's the problem with these big, slow, corporations, they're stuck in the 20th century.

Then Google could write something like this ...

Avoid Windows XP. We recommend Vista with anti-virus software if you want to invest in a brand new quad core 4GB 64 bit system with all new hardware, Desktop Linux, or any Macintosh.

OS X support notes - recent updates

Several interesting Apple Support articles have come out recently:

• Mac OS X 10.4: Keychain Access asks for keychain "login" after changing login password. The keychain password and the user account password are stored separately. It's possible to change one and not the other. This tells how to manually change the keychain password to match the login password.
• Browsing for PCs on a network requires that the PCs have NetBIOS enabled. (Wow, that's really old and creaky stuff.)
• How to recover when a server won't let you connect with a different account
• Single user and verbose startup (verbose is new to me)

Someone else has noticed a one year lifespan for a modern XP hard drive

I have two corporate XP machines, and between then I have to replace a drive every six months. My home XP and OS X drives last for years.

So I now have two completely unrelated corporate backup systems that run nightly.

I haven't seen anyone else comment on the lifespans of corporate hard drives, so I liked this post (emphasis mine)...

DadHacker » Blog Archive » Thoughts while rebooting

On the IT-ridden machines I regularly have to swab out twenty megabyte log files, logs from things that I didn’t even know were running on the machine, and when I find something like “ArScnr38″ running I have no idea if it’s spyware or something that an IT monkey stuck on my laptop to scan my Excel spreadsheets.

It’s hilarious when four different scanners are fighting for disk access. No wonder our drives are dying after like a year in service. I don’t work late, so I can only imagine what the buildings sound like at 3AM when Windows Update goes into its happy dance and reboots every single workstation.

“Shhhh… wait for it.”

“What, Dad? I’m sleepy.”

“Any second now…”

clikclickClickClikCLIKCLICKCCLLIICCKK-CLICK-***KA-CHUNGGGKGKGKG!!!!!***

“Wow! Do the lights flicker like that in every time zone?”

“That was nothing. Wait until they all ask the DHCP servers for an address!”

...The IT philosophy of bloat appears to be: “Screw the user, we own the machines, and if they can’t get work done with them then they can’t do any damage. More scanners! And loggers! And Java-based enterprisey things with *****up XML configuration schemas! If there’s CPU or disk space left we’re not doing our jobs; we have to pay for that call center expansion somehow!”

That's what I see. Between my heavy duty database work, the antivirus scanner, the corporate HP monitoring systems, Windows Search indexing, and the two nightly backups the hard drivers are being worked to death.

I really need to switch to an in-office NAS with a hot-swappable RAID array -- so I can rotate out bad drives without the hassle of a restore.

Aperture's SQLite Database

I'm going to fire-up the SQLite Database browser and follow these directions: The Deep Dark Depths of the Database (and some fingerprinting) - Inside Aperture. I wonder what iPhoto is doing these days -- be interesting to look for SQLite files in other Apple applications.

I recall that SQLite was thought to have threading issues with 10.4. I wonder if that's better with 10.5.