Status of WebM encoding on OSX?

[Manuel Schmalstieg]

Hello WebM discussion list,

I would like to ask what are the currently available methods of
producing WebM files under MacOSX, without having to use the command
line.

Are there any tools that have a GUI and that offer access to essential
settings such as the picture dimension, the frame rate and the bit
rate?

A perfect solution for me would be to use HandBrake, which has
extended settings as well as batch-encoding. Unfortunately it doesn't
currently offer VP8 output (it has H.264/x264, MPEG-4 FFmpeg, MPEG-2
FFmpeg and VP3 Theora).

The professional compression tools I could get access to (Apple's
Compressor, Adobe's Media Converter) don't offer WebM output.

Regarding the freely available front-ends that I tested:

* Miro Converter for OSX doesn't offer any settings at all, it doesn't
even allow to define the frame size or the bit rate.

* The Firefogg extension for Firefox provides the basic settings, but
doesn't offer batch encoding, and doesn't provide a way to store
custom settings for later use.

* There's a QuickTime component for OSX, but it doesn't seem to be
maintained: http://code.google.com/p/webm/downloads/list

Are there any new developments that I have been missing, or is there
currently no GUI-based way for videographers on the Mac to encode a
library of videos into high quality WebM?

Cheers,
Manuel

[Ryan Thompson]

As the writer of the quicktime component, this seems like what you would need.  I haven't really been putting much into maintenance as I haven't got any bug reports.

[Manuel Schmalstieg]

Ryan, it's great to have your direct feedback.

The issues I encountered so far with the Quicktime component:

1) Reading:
When reading a webm file in Quicktime Player 7 (7.6.6), it somehow
opens the file "progressively". With long files, it's very noticeable.
Let's say I open a file that is 50 minutes long. After opening it,
during the first 10 seconds, I can only move to the cursor to the 4
minutes mark. After 20 seconds, I can move it to the 8 minutes mark.
After a minute of loading, I can move it to the 25 minutes mark... and
so on, it will take a few minutes to fully load the file.

Also with some files, even when the video has fully loaded, I cannot
start playing from anywhere else than the beginning of the file. If I
move the marker to some point in the middle of the video, it previews
the images, but when I hit play, it jumps back to 00:00 and starts
from there.

The same files are behaving perfectly with the current version of VLC
- they load immediately, and I can access any point of the video.

2) Encoding:
When trying to export from Quicktime 7 into WebM, I notice that the
options don't allow to set a *frame dimension* for the video. I think
that his setting is extremely important, since WebM is a web
distribution format. It's a pretty common scenario to start from a
high resolution source file that must get encoded in a lower
resolution for distribution.

Finally, I had some cases where QT became unresponsive while
exporting, or crashed. I will send you the logs if I can reproduce
that.

My system is OSX 10.6.8, 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 GB Ram

PS -- I think I just figured out the most practical way for encoding
with the QuickTime component: using it with MPEG Streamclip. This
allows to select webm as output format, to define the frame size...
and it also supports batch encoding. The only downside is that the
encoding process is extremely slow.

Cheers,
Manuel

[kevin.bry...@gmail.com]

Is there any chance this will be updated to include VP9 support?