Seeking Quicktime converter

Baron Munchausen · #1 June 27th, 2002, 04:44 AM

No, I am not trying to convert things INTO Quicktime, I am seeking to convert them FROM Quicktime. The QT player is a nightmare for Windows yet Apple continues to play their own monopoly game and convince many companies to release movie trailers and other interesting things ONLY in the QT format! Argh! I will NOT install Apple's player in Windows. So, if I want to see things like the LotR trailers I have to get a converter. There must be one somwhere??? Can Apple be an even better monopolist than Microsoft and prevent anyone from decoding the format? Even WM8 has been broken...

dogscoff · #2 June 27th, 2002, 09:16 AM

I'm not aware of one, but if you find it, let me know.

zaphod-42 · #3 June 27th, 2002, 11:31 AM

I also have been looking for such a converter, but haven't found one.

The only working solution i found was using Quicktime Pro to export as mpg.
But its Quicktime.

Another problem is that commercial Quicktime movies are mostly password protected (like the LOTR Trailer) so none of the other tools i tried
were able to convert the files.

Recently i found http://www.eo-video.com/.
They say their player is able to convert
quicktime but i haven't tried it yet.

Baron Munchausen · #4 June 27th, 2002, 03:46 PM

I see that the player is free but the converter is time-limited. Unfortunately this is another unknown and you have to install the entire thing. I can't really guess how it will get along with the other players or other programs in general for that matter. It sure would be nice to have a lightweight, non-intrusive viewer/converter like Irfanview for video formats. Hmm, why are companies so obtuse about their data formats. All I want is to be able to see some movie trailers, not watch corporate warfare in my PC.

Edit: Erk? It sayd you have to have QT installed in order to play QT files? What use is this 'player' then? Deh! Oh, well. I guess Apple IS a better monopolist than Microsoft. I'll have to continue hoping for 'hacker' type people to convert and post the trailers I want to see.

[ June 27, 2002, 14:58: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

dogscoff · #5 June 27th, 2002, 04:36 PM

Personally I gave up trying to convert between file formats- I let someone else do the work=-) I'm building up a collection of music videos, with mpeg (and derivatives: asf, wmv etc) as the preferred format. In my experience, you'll usually find that if something is available as a qt then someone else will have made it available as an mpeg. It's just a matter of finding that someone using google and/ or irc.

My favouritest favourite toy is a wonderfully well-written bit of freeware called ASFrecorder. It takes all those pesky asx and wmx streams and dumps them onto your hard drive where they can be viewed at leisure. Nice compression too; I have some full videos (albeit in crappy quality) that take up less than a meg.

There are various other tools out there, most of which I have tried and found to be too flaky to use properly. I think there was even one which claimed it could convert any video format to an mpeg, simply by building a video out of screen grabs. Ingenious. Mad as a snake's socks, but ingenious. I haven't tried it because I wasn't prepared to pay for it.

I suppose if you were really clever, you could run some video capture software on your PC, and then feed it the video-out of another PC (or a Mac) running the QT. It sounds like more trouble than it's worth though...

BTW, with that whole piracy thread going on right now I'd just like to point out that I only ever download videos of songs I already have in CD or VHS format...

sachmo · #6 June 27th, 2002, 05:04 PM

Visit this site for all of your conVersion needs.

I believe that dossmvid.zip would be a program which might help you. Have a nice day!

[ June 27, 2002, 16:07: Message edited by: sachmo ]