Tip #1490: Problems Playing Android Videos
… for Codecs & Media
Tip #1490: Problems Playing Android Videos
Larry Jordan – LarryJordan.com
Switch Camera settings to shoot H.264.
This tip was contributed by Warren Nelson:
I shot a video on my Google Pixel 3 of my wife opening a birthday present and when I transferred it to my Mac, it wouldn’t play. After some detection, I discovered that an Android update had defaulted to an mp4 version with H.265/HEVC instead of their old H.264/AVC.
I’m not educated enough to know if QuickTime is choking the H.265 or the HEVC portion of this new update. I tested the old setting and it worked just fine.
Users can find this setting by clicking the Advanced link in the main Camera setting (see screen shot).
I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has fallen victim to Google wanting to store smaller video files. Thanks again for all your help over the years!
If Apple is starting to allow for Safari to play with new video formats, (see a previous tip) can FCPX be far behind by making HEVC compatible with QT?
Brian:
You are comparing apples to kumquats here. Safari will be supporting WebM in the next release of Big Sur (according to what they are doing in beta now). There is no relation between WebM and HEVC. Nor is there a necessary relation between QuickTime and HEVC. HEVC is a video codec. QuickTime is a media container, which can contain a variety of different codecs.
And, I just checked Compressor. It currently supports creating QuickTime movies containing media compressed using both 8- and 10-bit HEVC media.
Larry