Encoding Videos Rant
Published: 2024-02-14T22:36:15+01:00
It is so annoying to encode video in the modern age. There's dozens of different codecs, and dozens of different containers. I am using Pitivi to edit and encode a video that should run everywhere. The first attempt ran on my machine but not phones. The next attempt ran almost everywhere, except it doesn't have sound on Macs or iPhones. The third attempt was just janky and didn't work at all.
- Attempt 1: Pitivi MP4 with H264 and MP2 audio
- Attempt 2: Reencode above into MP4 using vLC
- Attempt 3: MP4 with H264 and AC-3 audio
The fourth attempt will be MKV H264 converted to MP4 with ffmpeg. If THAT doesn't work, I will do something more exotic like WebM or even Ogg Theora! There is an Ogg JS plugin which can be embedded into web pages to play Ogg files...
This post will be updated once a successful combination of codecs and steps to produce a video that works everywhere has been found.
2024-02-19: Update – AAC Audio Works!
The video had to be encoded with AAC audio to work properly on Apple devices out of the box. The magic combination for the future is thus H.264 and AAC audio.
License: CC-BY-SA-4.0.
Written by: @[email protected]