Thread
Compressing video for 68k Macs
I am just curious what are the best options in QT 7 Pro to compress videos to play on a 68040 mac. I am trying out Cinepak, 256 Colors, Medium Quality.
I went through and tried to do this a year ago. The answer to your question is of course entirely going to depend on what video you're compressing and what your expectations are.
I wrote down some of my thoughts on the subject from that time, here: http://synack.net/~bbraun/68kvideo.html Unfortunately, they're probably not in a very usable form for you, but the gist of it was I was unable to achieve a playback framerate I found acceptable at 320x240, which was about the minimum resolution I found acceptable, all on a Q630.
FWIW, the content I was encoding was random TV content from the 68k era.
I wrote down some of my thoughts on the subject from that time, here: http://synack.net/~bbraun/68kvideo.html Unfortunately, they're probably not in a very usable form for you, but the gist of it was I was unable to achieve a playback framerate I found acceptable at 320x240, which was about the minimum resolution I found acceptable, all on a Q630.
FWIW, the content I was encoding was random TV content from the 68k era.
Since I haven't really done much with Quicktime on 68k, the first thing you should do is see what it can handle. If you open an .mov on your 68k, what does Quicktime offer for output formats? If I am not mistaken, Cinepak and animation codecs are maybe old enough to work, but can't be sure. Also don't disregard MPEG1, or MotionJPEG. MotionJPEG is a good tradeoff that you can really dial it down to essentially no compression at all, which results in big files but drastically reduces CPU load. This might be of some help depending on what, if any, acceleration your machine has for video.I am just curious what are the best options in QT 7 Pro to compress videos to play on a 68040 mac. I am trying out Cinepak, 256 Colors, Medium Quality.
If I had to guess I would say you will have more options and success encoding with a PowerPC running Quicktime 4-6. Around QT6 and 7 Apple started to jettison many of the older codecs which would be particularly helpful on an older system. You can probably still get it to work on a modern Mac in QT7, but it might take a bit more effort.
1991
QuickTime 1.0 works on all color-capable Macintosh computers running Color QuickDraw (models with either a 68020 or 68030 processor) and either System 6.0.7 or System 7.0
a later version will add QuickTime support for monochrome, 68000-based Macintoshes.
As a result, you, the developer, can take it for granted that QuickTime will be available on any Macintosh running your software.
QUICKTIME 1.0: "YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES"
Original movie
Merry_go_round.mov
1989 demo
A parody of the end scene of Michael Jackson's music video, "Black or White." This is from the 1992 QuickTime Version 1.0 CD.
QuickTime 1.0 works on all color-capable Macintosh computers running Color QuickDraw (models with either a 68020 or 68030 processor) and either System 6.0.7 or System 7.0
a later version will add QuickTime support for monochrome, 68000-based Macintoshes.
As a result, you, the developer, can take it for granted that QuickTime will be available on any Macintosh running your software.
QUICKTIME 1.0: "YOU OUGHTA BE IN PICTURES"
Original movie
Merry_go_round.mov
1989 demo