Re: Best Movie/Animation Format for LARGE files

[davidf(at)dfanning.com (David Fanning)]

William Thompson (thompson@orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov) writes:

> I wonder if the larger movies "coarsen up" to be compatible with Microsoft
> Windows mpeg players.  We've been making MPEG movies on our Unix workstations
> using mpeg_encode for some time now.  The movies always play well on our
> workstations, but sometimes the movies don't play correctly on Windows
> machines.  This problem has always been attributed in the past to the size of
> the individual frames.  However, recently I was told that a movie which
> wouldn't play in Windows in its original format, was made to do so when it was
> regenerated at the same frame size, but with a lower quality parameter.  The
> current theory is that Windows players refuse to play MPEGs unless they can
> decode them fast enough to play the frames at the correct frame rate.

Just five minutes ago I got a longish response from RSI 
technical support on this topic, which seems to confirm 
this theory. It's fairly technical, and I didn't understand 
a lot of it on first reading, but I'll see what I can do 
to clean it up and pass it along.

In the meantime, it would probably help to know which
*viewers* people are using when they notice problems.

Cheers,

David
-- 
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting
Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
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