Hi there, just a quick note to let you know that a new version of MediaInfo Mac (0.7.6.30) has been released, not only it includes several bugfixes and improvements in the Cocoa arena, but also a new build of the MediaInfo engine which features the following improvements:

• AVC: Count of reference frames.
• AU: Comments.
• Some global speed improvement.
• Id3v2: Unsynchronized frames support (v2.3 & v2.4).
• MKV: handling of files created for streaming.
• MPEG-4: Handling of corrupted stream size info with some PCM streams.
• DVD video: Hebrew patch ("iw" code is mapped to Hebrew).
• MPEG-4: better handling of bitrate mode (VBR or CBR).
• AVI: MediaInfo reads now the framerate value from the container rather than the stream value.
• AC3: TrueHD detection.
• MPEG-TS (or Bluray): VC-1, AC3+ and AC3 TrueHD detection.
• AVC in MKV: all SEI userdata infos from x264/eavc in Writing library settings.
• EVO: Better detection of duration.
• Dirac: raw files parsing.
• MPEG-TS: Dirac management.
• MPEG-TS: DVB subtitles/Teletext management.
• MPEG-4 Visual (DivX/XviD): writing library name was missing.
• MPEG-Video: some DTS files with wrong extension were detected as MPEG-Video.
• SWF: Compressed SWF files support is back.

If you are an actual user, just launch the application and use the auto update feature, or you can get the latest version by visiting the official MediaInfo Mac website.

As usual, feel free to leave any comment or suggestion in here.

Enjoy

You should consider this piece of software my "hello world" project in the Mac development arena, because, even the fact that i have pretty good skills when it comes to OO development, I'm totally new when it comes to the Mac, and I'm using this project mainly as a learning experience.

Attention: download links were moved

In order to keep things organized, the download links and general information for MediaInfo Mac were moved into this new website.

In the past few days i have been working in a full Aqua version of a linux tool called "Mediainfo", so this is the result.
Let me introduce you to "MediaInfo Mac".

MediaInfo Mac does just one thing: it gives you a lot of information about multimedia files, even files that QuickTime can't read, and it does that by using a custom Universal Binary build of the linux library "libmediainfo" by Jerome Martinez as its core.
This application is obviously OpenSource and i will make all the sources available as soon as i finish cleaning the code and configuring an SVN repository on this server.
MediaInfo Mac requires any PowerPC or Intel Macintosh computer running MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger" or newer.
If you have any question or suggestion, feel free to leave your comment below :).

A BIG thank you goes to Rainer Brockerhoff, (who is a true monster in the Macintosh development area), for having the patience to answer a lot of my questions, and also, to the guys at #macdev on freenode for helping me to understand a lot of things in the "Cocoa Arena". Thank you, i really appreciate your time.

In order to keep things in organized, anything in relation with MediaInfo Mac is going to be on this new website.

IF you are any kind of software tracker, there is a feed with MediaInfo updates, and it is compatible with the AppCast definition.

It was some months ago when I wrote a tutorial about how to encode good quality h.264 video with aacPlus audio in order to use the great capabilities of the new flash player version 9.0.115 (that in case you missed it, now can play h264 video and aacPlus v2 audio).
Due to some personal convictions for my prior tutorial, i decided to use FFMPEG, and while it does the job pretty well, it has some limitations (specially in the video scaling / resizing area). So in my particular case, I had to use several php / bash scripts in order to feed the encoders with the proper resizing data, etcetera.
Well, let me introduce you to the 2nd version of my h.264 / aacPlus v2 tutorial.

This time I used Mencoder, an amazing tool that comes with the mPlayer package, and i also created what i think is a really nice bash script to make the process almost 100% smooth and simple.

These are the things you will need:

• the mPlayer package for whatever platform you're running
• the Nero enhanced AAC audio encoder if you are on linux / unix or my build of the 3GPP HE-AAC encoder if you are on a Mac.
• the GPAC utilities
• the x264 video encoder

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I needed a native solution to encode HE-AAC Plus audio on a Mac, but there is not any native solution so far right now, so i compiled the reference encoder (enhAacPlusEnc) published by the 3GPP group.
I also created an xCode project to make it easy to manage future builds.
This is an "Universal Binary" build, meaning that it will work on both, Intel based and PowerPC based Macs.

You can download the universal binary encoder by clicking here, and you can download the xcode project by clicking here.

Keep in mind that i had to make some minor modifications in order to make it compile as Universal Binary, so you wil find some minor diferences when comparing with the original source code released by the 3GPP group.

If you have any question, leave a comment here.

Important

This tutorial has been updated (and improved) a lot, for the new version please follow this link.

UPDATE: I realized that when i read a tutorial about anything, in most cases, i want to first see what result im going to get so then i can decide if the tutorial is worth reading (or not), so here is a head by head comparison: 

This is an h264 file encoded by the guys at apple.com, it's the TV Commercial for the brand new iMac: ORIGINAL VIDEO

This is the same file re-encoded using the steps on this tutorial: RE-ENCODED VIDEO

Obviouisly, there is an small quality degradation, but keep in mind that apple's original movie is 14MB in size, while mine is 1.5MB ;).
You can play my MP4 video with almost any video player out there, but remember that not all video players out there support HE-AAC audio (or aacPlus) and b-frames, so if you play the file with a player like QuickTime, it is NOT going to work.
I recommend mPlayer or VLC media player to play this kind of video, and obviously, Flash Player will play the file perfectly too.

Update for Macintosh users:

I updated the bash script on this post so it can be used also by Macintosh users, so instead of using the NERO Digital AAC Encoder, Macintosh users can take advantage of the native 3GPP AAC Plus V2 encoder that i just compiled. Visit this post for more information about it.

Like a lot of people out there, i was really happy when i found the press release from Adobe, stating the addition of h.264 video support and HE-AAC Plus audio to their upcoming Flash Player versions, and also, to the upcoming Flash Media Server.
After following several "Tutorials" all over the web, i found that there was not any single one that gave me the results that i wanted; that is, good video quality, with the less possible file size, so after a lot of trial and error and after a lot of help and optimizations by the guys at the ffmpeg and x264 IRC channels, i decided to create this tutorial that will most probably help you a lot to encode good quality h264 video, with HE-AAC Plus Audio, and all this inside an MP4 container with tags and all ready to deliver to your visitors.

There are several things that you will need in order to do this:

• The latest SVN version of the x264 video codec.
• The latest SVN version of the excellent ffmpeg video encoding utility.
• The latest version of the GPAC utilies (it contains several tools to mux and work with MP4 files).
• The linux version of the Nero Digital AAC Audio Encoder
• GCC 4.1 or later installed, this is a requeriment for x264 to encode faster. It WILL work if you compile with older versions of GCC, but you will have performance issues resulting in more time needed to compress the video streams.

Some friendly bookmarks:
SVN checkout for x264:
svn checkout svn://svn.videolan.org/vlc/trunk vlc-trunk
SVN checkout for ffmpeg:
svn checkout svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg

First of all, I'm assuming that you are running Linux, Mac-OS X or any other UNIX variant. I never tried this on windows because I am pretty sure that there are lot of really nice programs that you could buy to do the job.
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Oh my God, some weeks ago I bought a license for this amazing piece of software made by the guys at macrabbit.com. This is not just another CSS Editor, this is **THE** CSS Editor.
Not only you can edit each and every aspect of the css code in a visual manner, but also, every change that you do is reflected in the display window in real time! Yay!
One of the features that i really love about this software is the "X-Ray" function, where you basically click on the different elements of the webpage you are working on, and it tells you all the CSS classes that are affecting it, you also see the full inheritance tree and you can, obviously create new CSS Classes with full inheritance control thanks to the "inspector" window.
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