Old video formats..


Intel Indeo 5 on Mac OS X??

I've been doing some work for the V&A recently following on from the work Ultralab did on Every Object Tells A Story. Basically, they needed some videos compressed to work on an iPod video (specifically a Vodcast). Now having the target videos all one format meant that the job wasn't too bad, but the problem for us was that the source videos had completely different specifications. We had various types of .mov .wmv and .avi all with different codecs, frame sizes and framerates. Most of these didn't faze the incredible ffmpegX; a tool I find myself relying on more and more these days...

One of the videos (an AVI) just didn't want to play ball... ffmpegx spat it back at me in disgust! I tried Quicktime (unsupported), VLC - still no cigar, Windows Media Player... anyway nothing wanted to play it. So I went back to ffmpegx and clicked the info button which told me the codec was IV5. After a little bit of Googling this turned out to be Intel Indeo Video 5, the last version of a very old hardware accelerated format built by Intel for Windows playback. After discovering this I realised I'd have to fire up a PC to get anywhere with this vid. Or would I??

Another quick Googling showed that Apple had indeed built support for this codec into QuickTime with the aid of an extension (shudder) to be placed in the System Folder. Ahh.. System Folder.. Mac OS < X! Back to the PC! After the PC refused to boot I was back to the Mac again scratching my head. I thought, "what If I load up classic and convert the video to something more modern?" (My PB 1.67Ghz is too new to boot classic y'see) This would be fine if I had QuickTime for classic, but as i have QuickTime for X I'd deleted QuickTime classic years ago, or maybe Apple had during a System upgrade. ;-)

No problems, I'll install QuickTime for classic. This was fine but QT 6 for classic requires you to pay to export files to another format, and my QT 7 Pro key wouldn't work in QT 6! So the search was on to find an old version of QuickTime, not crippled by QuickTime Pro. Not much was available on the Web anymore, and again I realised I could have been finally stuck, if I hadn't noticed the QuickTime VR authoring studio box on the shelf here at Ultralab. This ten year old piece of software included in the box a version of QuickTime 2.5 which surprisingly worked with Indeo plug-in above. Finally I could see and hear the video submission. A quick save as turned the offending AVI into a MOV and then ffmpegx could happily continue chugging through the videos.

All in all a funny little tail and it makes you wonder how and why people create stuff in such ancient formats.. Oh, the video itself was really excellent!

Posted: Fri - January 27, 2006 at 09:27 AM          

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