[Oneota]

Hey all,

So I'm looking at the 3 computers under my desk (a G5 tower, a PC I never boot, and a B&W G3 I only boot up for OS 9 stuff), and pondering how nice it'd be to condense all that down to one machine. I'm thinkin' a 24" iMac would fit the bill nicely.

Bootcamp would make the iMac a better PC than the old HP P.O.S. I've got there now, so that one's easy. The B&W G3, though, would strangely be a little tougher to replace. Its primary uses boil down to 2 things: Old OS 9 games, and converting the occasional Indeo video clip to MPEG4 using QuickTime Pro. I've pretty much figured out that all those old OS 9 games have Windows equivalents, so Bootcamp would take care of that. That just leaves the video conversion problem.

I've found the Windows Media Indeo playback components, but if Windows Media Player has an "Export" function, they've done a darn good job of hiding it. I'll be darned if I can find the Indeo codecs for the Windows version of QuickTime. I know OS X can't deal with Indeo video, but I figured it'd be easier on Windows than it is under OS 9! I've tried SheepShaver, but it's just too unstable (it doesn't do me any good if the application crashes before it's done converting).
Anyone got any pointers? Any Windows apps out there that'll save Indeo video as something more versatile?

[ink]

MPlayer can play it without converting it, or you can use mencoder to transcode it.

[philm]

You can launch the Classic version of Quicktime Player which will play the movies which are encoded with Indeo. Better still, you can export from this program and re-encode your videos with a more modern codec which will then play natively under OSX (assuming you have the Pro version of QTP).

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by philm 

You can launch the Classic version of Quicktime Player which will play the movies which are encoded with Indeo. Better still, you can export from this program and re-encode your videos with a more modern codec which will then play natively under OSX (assuming you have the Pro version of QTP).

Yeah, except Classic is no-workie on the Intel-based Macs (and SheepShaver is too unstable).

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by ink 

MPlayer can play it without converting it, or you can use mencoder to transcode it.

I've tried playing some of these clips with mplayer in the past. Some of them sorta-kinda work, but the success rate is far below 100%.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. Any other ideas?

[turtle777]

You can use Mplayer in ther terminal to dump the video stream to AVI, and then use QT to do with it whatever you want.

Use option −dumpstream

MPlayer

-t

[philm]

Originally Posted by Oneota 

Yeah, except Classic is no-workie on the Intel-based Macs (and SheepShaver is too unstable).

Sure, but if there are just a few videos as you mentioned, you could just do this on your G5 before getting your new Mac.

[pra9ab0y]

I would recommend vlc player for OSX to play them but to convert them I would have to say 3gp converter Its a FREE small little application that runs on windows XP therefore using your bootcamp installation. It is easy to use except to begin with its in japanese but that can be changed by selecting a different language in the bottom left hand conrner of the application


http://www.nurs.or.jp/~calcium/3gpp/...nverter034.zip

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by philm 

Sure, but if there are just a few videos as you mentioned, you could just do this on your G5 before getting your new Mac.

Yeah, except I'm still occasionally coming across new ones (well, they're older videos, but you know what I mean). Why anyone ever encoded anything using this garbage-heap of a codec I'll never understand...

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by what_the_heck 

You can use Mplayer in ther terminal to dump the video stream to AVI, and then use QT to do with it whatever you want.

Use option −dumpstream

MPlayer

-t

I'll give it another shot, but like I said before: mplayer's success rate with Indeo video is nothing to write home about.

I guess it's not the end of the world of these clips are lost to the junkheap of time. I'll certainly survive.

Thanks, all!

[ink]

But if you download the codec pack, MPlayer *is* using the Windows decoders, so...

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by ink 

But if you download the codec pack, MPlayer *is* using the Windows decoders, so...

Ahh...didn't realize that. I thought mplayer always used its own decoders, and that they were the same on Windows as on the Mac. I'll definitely give it another shot, then.

I assume you can call mplayer using the CLI on Windows just like on the Mac?

[imitchellg5]

QuickTime Pro is a good tool.

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5 

QuickTime Pro is a good tool.

Indeed - and, as I said, I would gladly use QuickTime Pro on Windows if I could find the windows versions of the Indeo QuickTime components. I found the Windows Media codecs, but QuickTime doesn't use them (and they aren't available for OS X).

[Oneota]

Originally Posted by what_the_heck 

You can use Mplayer in ther terminal to dump the video stream to AVI, and then use QT to do with it whatever you want.

Use option −dumpstream

MPlayer

-t

Sweet! Mencoder seems to do the job nicely.

For anyone else's benefit, here's the command I used:
mencoder <input> -o <output> -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4

Problem solved, I can now go out and buy an iMac.