Railfan Technology > Mac Users & Video on TO

I recall at least one discussion in the past regarding issues Mac users were having when Trainorders changed its embedded video player app few years ago.

Lately, I've been buying fully functional Macs that cost ~$1500 back in 2005 for about $70-$120, briefly going back to my old hobby, retro-computing. Naturally, I fiddled around with video editing on these machines, going to the extreme of making videos playable on a 20 year old Mac, PowerBook 520c using a 33 MHz 68040 CPU.

In the process, I recalled the Mac Users vs. video playback discussions. A quick solution I came up with was to use my Trainorders web page's storage space to host a QuickTime-based video, which should play natively on almost all the Macs ever made.

Trainorders embedded video uses WebM (pushed by Google) or Adobe Flash (using JCplayer). WebM is not supported by some browsers, especially the ones on older machines, and Flash is just plain bad news on Apple machines.

I got gjc's permission (a.k.a. Left Coast Rail Videos) to repost his Drone Foaming video for this purpose, so give it a try by following the link below:

http://members.trainorders.com/cchan006

Feedbacks are very welcome.

Works fine on my Mac Laptop (15" late 2013 Macbook Pro/16 gig ram.)
and as well with my 2011 27" iMac and secondary 32" Samsung monitor.
I normally have Quicktime installed however as noted Flash is not
something Apple uses or encourages. Although I do have the current
version of Flash just in case
The initial original downloaded just fine, your version ironically
seems smoother. Thank you for your efforts. And like
you keep an older G4 around which is used for
the flatbed and the Nikon Scanner.

Worked fine on my iMac dating from mid 2010.

JBWX

It worked well and looked great on my brand new Macbook Air laptop.

Thanks for the feedbacks, guys.

Looks like you guys are using Intel Macs with dual core processors at the minimum, so I can probably use the more processor intensive H.264 instead of MPEG4/Part 2 codec. That might be the reason why the video played smoother, because the MPEG4/Part 2 codec is less CPU intensive, at the expense of storage space.

Well, if other Mac users run into problems with playing back videos on TO, I may have found a "patch", where I repost the video using the QuickTime container to remove the browser overhead of WebM and Flash.