My name is Matthew Bredel and as of March, 2007, I am a full-time, work-at-home internet marketer.
For close to 10 years, I worked for a defense company which was an OK job, but I was so uninspired in life and frankly, I needed some more money. That is when I first discovered internet marketing! Now I admit that I didn't start making thousands in my first couple of months (in fact, I lost my shirt!), but I finally saw the "internet light"...
MP4 (h.264) videos are the hottest and one of the most robust video file formats being used today. YouTube uses it for High Quality and High Definition videos and new Adobe Flash players can process them. Unfortunately, within the MP4 h.264 file is Quicktime Indexing information, and if it is in the wrong spot, you may have some streaming problems. The fix is simple, though. Read on…
A few months back, I was fighting with the problem concerning the MP4 videos that I was rendering on Sony Vegas Movie Studio. Here’s the situation…
Typically when I do a video of myself (using a camcorder or a Flip Camera), I edit and render the video in Sony Vegas Movie Studio.
I choose to render, almost exclusively, in MP4 (H.264) format these days for a couple of reasons:
1) YouTube supports the MP4 format (H.264) in both High Quality and High Definition uploads.
2) MP4 format is now supported in the newer Adobe Flash Players, so it is compatible with most of my current video containers and players.
But I did discover something bothersome when I tried embedding these videos into my current flash players…The video player would want to upload the entire video file BEFORE it started playing.
That is a problem! I don’t want people to have to wait 3 minutes to BEGIN watching my videos. Typically, the video will start to play within a matter of seconds due to the buffering feature of streaming video. What was going on?
This has to do with where the “QuickTime Indexing” information resides in the file. My player looks for this index information first, and if it located at the end of the MP4 file, it must download the entire file BEFORE it can read this information.
(This is common with a lot of flash players and flash containers out there. In this case, I am using a Camtasia flash player that I generated using Camtasia Theater.)
So the solution is simple: Move the QT Index information from the end of the file to the beginning…but don’t do this in an editor!!
There was a simple Adobe AIR application called QTIndexSwapper that I found on Renaun Erickson’s blog. It is free to download and it is very easy to use. You just browser for the MP4 file you want the QT Index swapped and within about 5-10 seconds, it spits out a new file.
Simple as that! (And this solved the problem perfectly!)
Sure, it is kind of annoying and I wish Sony Vegas Movie Studio would fix it, but it really does not take much effort and the QTIndexSwapper application does not cost anything.
If you are having this problem,
(You may also need to install Adobe AIR, too. It is free)
cheers…matt
P.S. NOTE!! You do NOT need to use QTIndexSwapper if you are ONLY planning on uploading to YouTube. YouTube will re-render your video anyway and the index location is not relevant. You only need to do this if you plan on hosting your own videos on your website!
P.P.S. This also only is relevant for MP4 videos in the h.264 format!
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May 28th, 2009 at 3:29 am