MP4 encoders on OSX

[edwinbradford]

Hi all,

I'm about to change from Vista to OSX so need to find a new x264 encoder for After Effects uncompressed files. Previously I did all of this with MeGUI which has been great, I'll go on using MeGUI on a Vista partition for my video captures as they have a proprietary codec I can only access on Windows but it would be good if there was an encoder as good as MeGUI available on OSX for After Effects work. Any suggestions or recommendations? Is FFMPEG relevant here? I don't plan to output H264 directly from After Effects as I don't believe the conversion is anywhere as good as I've obtained with MeGUI. Worse case scenario I'll just boot into Vista and convert with MeGUI but obviously it would be good not to have to and there must be an open source / freeware OSX x264 encoding tool available.

Thanks for any advice.

[smok3]

there is handbrake, other option imho is virtualbox + winxp + shared folders, so you can encode mov files directly from virtual windows (i still use my bat scripts written in 2004 that way...)

[edwinbradford]

I've heard of Handbrake, I may even have used it in the past but it would be years ago. How does it compare to MeGUI for quality and speed? Anyone know? I ask because it seems like MeGUI is the preferred choice for Windows so I'm wondering what the difference is, is it the Avisynth support?

[J_Darnley]

Since all free encoders use x264, they can all produce the same quality and the same speed.

[smok3]

I've heard of Handbrake, ... is it the Avisynth support?

there is no native avisynth on osx... (but one can (ab)use quicktime in similar ways, so called 'REFERENCE movies')

[qyot27]

There's also Wine, but that requires A) using MacPorts to get Wine installed (because it's best to be identical to the way it works under most other *nix platforms), B) doing commandline work to install AviSynth and ffdshow and use x264 itself*,as well as registry work to get ffdshow configured correctly, and C) requires relying on either AVISource or one of the iterations of FFmpegSource, since DirectShowSource doesn't work under Wine yet, and who knows when it will. A and B being points that may be rather uncomfortable to those used to GUIs, but all of that really only has to be done once, save for the 'using x264 itself' part.

*whether said x264 is a Windows build also running under Wine or a native OSX build that's getting footage piped into it from Windows versions of avs2yuv, ffmpeg, mplayer, etc. Under totally unscientific tests I performed on x264 and Wine over a year ago on Ubuntu, Windows builds almost always ran better through Wine than they did on Windows - however, that was before the ability to link to LAVF, FFMS2, or so on. I dunno if that would affect things any or not. I semi-routinely use HCenc 0.24 and Sherpya's mencoder builds under Wine on Snow Leopard and they work fine for everything I've done with them, although I've yet to do anything like that with x264 (mostly just because I'd rather go with a native build I compiled myself; I'm not crazy enough to try and compile mencoder).

[edwinbradford]

I didn't even know you could run Wine on OSX but I think I'd probably dual boot rather than Wine or VMWare, I tend to think of VMWare as good for low demand usage and whenever I check on Wine sadly it doesn't support my needs. On the Avisynth Wiki it says they were developing a cross platform release, version 3, but development seems to have stalled. I found a great thread comparing Handbrake to MeGUI here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=127135). It looks like the difference is not as great as I thought, I don't understand the finer details of what they're saying but Handbrake seems just as good as MeGUI and anything cross platform is a big plus for me, I'll give it a try. Also thanks for the Reference movie tip, I'll google it.