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york28 · Mar 6, 2003, 03:15 PM

I have a project that I'm working on that involves embedding movies into web pages. Right now I have saved them as .mov's with the MPEG4 codec, which seems to be the best size/quality ratio. But I know that since the majority of windows computers (or at least the majority of the ones that I've used) don't have quicktime installed, so all of those viewers will have to install it first.

Are there any other options? Would an MPEG of some sort be better? Thanks for the help.

Simon Mundy · Mar 6, 2003, 05:13 PM

I'd suggest the big 3 - Quicktime, Real and WMP. If you get a copy of Media Cleaner, it can automatically export to all three at once. I'd make a lo-fi version for 56k users and a hi-fi version that caters for 256-512k users.

Millennium · Mar 6, 2003, 05:55 PM

Your best bet would be to save as a plain MPEG-4 with AAC audio. QuickTime and WiMP can both play this, and I think RealPlayer might be able to as well.

There's apparently a way to hack the 3ivx codec to make it encode a standard MPEG-4 file (this will yield better quality than Apple's MPEG-4 encoder), but at the moment I don't know how that's done. I'll do some more research and get back to you.

york28 · Mar 7, 2003, 12:44 PM

I changed movies to MPEG4's at 15 fps, which gives the same file size as before, aroud 600-700k each (there are ten, but they are all under 30 seconds.)

Then I found out that you have to have WMP 9 to play them on a windows computer, otherwise you need quicktime anyway. Oh well.