Front Row and Video Formats
(This is a technical post, you may want to skip if you are feeling bored already)
I recently got Front Row installed on my pre-IR iMac using this walkthrough, Front Row being Apple's slightly basic alternative to Windows Media Centre, as a way of using that mac as a set-top box for your TV (in the case of the new Mac Mini) or as a replacement TV (if you are rich enough to own a 30" Apple Display).
Anyway, the app is all well and good using a keyboard, but the beauty of the newer macs is that you can use the Apple Remote to control Front Row from a distance. Enter Salling Clicker, a brilliant little app that allows you to use your Bluetooth enabled phone to do most anything with your mac. From controlling a Keynote presentation, skipping a song in iTunes, to even controlling the mouse. With this functionality, and a little plugin for Clicker which allows more refined control over Front Row, you are all set up to go with your new Mac Media Centre. Or are you?
Really, Front Row only acts as a composite front-end for iTunes, iPhoto, Quicktime and DVD player. So it turns out Front Row can only play a video that Quicktime can play. When checking my hard drive, it seems that not all the video files I have are Quicktime playable, seeing as I normally use VLC for my visual needs. So when faced with a couple of WMV, OGM files and those god-awful Real Media files, I was stuck. Before anyone says 'why didn't you just use 'Flip4Mac' to play WMVs in Quicktime. I have, and found it very unstable, so I need to convert them.
As anyone would do in this situation, I gathered my senses, loaded Safari and headed over to google.com. With the WMV and Real Media files I was in luck. A wonderful app called 'FFMpegX' is available that can convert almost anything to...well a smaller number of file types. But thankfully Divx/Xvid AVI is one of those formats. So off I go converting my video files to a common format. Real Media being the biggest pain in the arse for conversion time. 3 to 4 hours on a 2Ghz G5. Why do people use it? Real Media is a shocking format to encode anything in, audio or video.
Then I come across a .OGM file, I'd never heard of these before but it seems VLC can play them and Quicktime can't. FFMpegX also spits it out as being an unknown format. What do I do?
Well I google again. Googling does seem to be main vice at the moment. I google for everything. If you ever think I'm being clever when emailing you or over IM, chances are I just googled/wikipedia-ed it.
Anyway, I found a site linking to couple of neat Unix terminal apps that can split an OGM file into its constituent parts. Once done I found there was a Divx .AVI file and a few .OGG (Ogg-Vorbis Audio) files, one being the English soundtrack and the others in those funny foreign languages. Anyway, FFMpegX also spat the .OGG files out when trying to merge the Video and Audio. So I then set about trying to convert the .OGG to .MP3. Again I googled and seems I was in luck. Audacity is a free audio-editing app that allows you to export a .OGG to a .MP3, which took about 4 minutes for a feature-length audio track. Then the 'muxing' (Multiplexing) took another few minutes to combine the audio and video.
While apps like FFMpegX are coming together nicely and are supporting more and more formats, there are still a few that require such long-winded processes, some of which mean my processor runs at over 80% for extended times, which can't be healthy.
If everyone just used Mpeg or a common codec like Divx life would be so much more simple.
I recently got Front Row installed on my pre-IR iMac using this walkthrough, Front Row being Apple's slightly basic alternative to Windows Media Centre, as a way of using that mac as a set-top box for your TV (in the case of the new Mac Mini) or as a replacement TV (if you are rich enough to own a 30" Apple Display).
Anyway, the app is all well and good using a keyboard, but the beauty of the newer macs is that you can use the Apple Remote to control Front Row from a distance. Enter Salling Clicker, a brilliant little app that allows you to use your Bluetooth enabled phone to do most anything with your mac. From controlling a Keynote presentation, skipping a song in iTunes, to even controlling the mouse. With this functionality, and a little plugin for Clicker which allows more refined control over Front Row, you are all set up to go with your new Mac Media Centre. Or are you?
Really, Front Row only acts as a composite front-end for iTunes, iPhoto, Quicktime and DVD player. So it turns out Front Row can only play a video that Quicktime can play. When checking my hard drive, it seems that not all the video files I have are Quicktime playable, seeing as I normally use VLC for my visual needs. So when faced with a couple of WMV, OGM files and those god-awful Real Media files, I was stuck. Before anyone says 'why didn't you just use 'Flip4Mac' to play WMVs in Quicktime. I have, and found it very unstable, so I need to convert them.
As anyone would do in this situation, I gathered my senses, loaded Safari and headed over to google.com. With the WMV and Real Media files I was in luck. A wonderful app called 'FFMpegX' is available that can convert almost anything to...well a smaller number of file types. But thankfully Divx/Xvid AVI is one of those formats. So off I go converting my video files to a common format. Real Media being the biggest pain in the arse for conversion time. 3 to 4 hours on a 2Ghz G5. Why do people use it? Real Media is a shocking format to encode anything in, audio or video.
Then I come across a .OGM file, I'd never heard of these before but it seems VLC can play them and Quicktime can't. FFMpegX also spits it out as being an unknown format. What do I do?
Well I google again. Googling does seem to be main vice at the moment. I google for everything. If you ever think I'm being clever when emailing you or over IM, chances are I just googled/wikipedia-ed it.
Anyway, I found a site linking to couple of neat Unix terminal apps that can split an OGM file into its constituent parts. Once done I found there was a Divx .AVI file and a few .OGG (Ogg-Vorbis Audio) files, one being the English soundtrack and the others in those funny foreign languages. Anyway, FFMpegX also spat the .OGG files out when trying to merge the Video and Audio. So I then set about trying to convert the .OGG to .MP3. Again I googled and seems I was in luck. Audacity is a free audio-editing app that allows you to export a .OGG to a .MP3, which took about 4 minutes for a feature-length audio track. Then the 'muxing' (Multiplexing) took another few minutes to combine the audio and video.
While apps like FFMpegX are coming together nicely and are supporting more and more formats, there are still a few that require such long-winded processes, some of which mean my processor runs at over 80% for extended times, which can't be healthy.
If everyone just used Mpeg or a common codec like Divx life would be so much more simple.
posted by Jon at 8:11 pm
7 Comments:
OGM sounds like the movie version of OGG. And I know a few OGG fans who would rip out your spleen for having converted OGG to MP3 :-D
Pretty hardcore going straight for the spleen! Pretty unpleasent death, lots of bleeding and not much else!
Mike Barrett
Send a note to Telestream at support@flip4mac.com or go here to request specific functions and report issues:
http://flip4mac.com/request.htm
"If everyone just used Mpeg or a common codec like Divx life would be so much more simple."
Mpeg is essentially a codec - just a very well known one. Changes are your .ogm file had an Mpeg video stream in it (probably even encoded with divx or xvid!).
.ogm is just a container format that holds the audio and the video together in one place, it isn't a codec as such.
The problem is that apple haven't provided support for .ogm (or various other containers) yet. Perhaps because they haven't had time to yet, but more likely that they're trying to turn people towards their own .mp4 container which shares many of the features .ogm and .mkv hold, but which is a format owned by apple themselves.
People shouldn't complain that there is a healthy amount of competition and development going into file formats; they should ask apple why they aren't letting us use these formats with their products...
If you use the DivX plug in form http://www.divx.com/divx/mac/ you can open avi movies with quicktime and therefore with frontrow. I use it with no problem on an intel imac. You can also use iSquint to convert the avi to mp4 for the ipod. The last is actually a lot better cause mp4 can be added to the itues library and you can share them over several macs on the local network (shared videos optionon front row).
it is fairly easy to add support for codecs to Quicktime (aka Frontrow's backend); a simple google search of "frontrow codec support" can do wonders. there aren't many .component files to install and then "viola!" you have support for ac3, ogm, etc, etc.
It is not a problem of too many codecs used but Quicktimes lack of support for all codecs. VLC has no problems with most codecs so why does Quicktime.
I'm still stunned by my XBMC (xbox media center). It plays just about anything and it will even play video files that are archived in rar zip etc.
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