Apple Screen Codec
September 1st, 2009 by 
Multimedia Mike
In reading Ars Technica’s lengthy, thorough review of Apple’s new Snow Leopard, I noticed the addition of screen recording to QuickTime. The screenshots indicate that it is configurable for “medium” and “high” quality. Naturally, I bring this up because I wonder what format the video is saved in. QuickTime’s extensive suite of default video codecs does not include a lossless, screen video-oriented codec (per my recollection). And since the feature is out there, people are going to expect FFmpeg and all of its descendant apps to be able to transcode it.
Posted in Multimedia PressWatch | 
5 Comments »
September 1st, 2009 at 8:36 pm
I suspect they will simply do recording into any format supported by QuickTime (that “recording quality” setting hints so).
September 1st, 2009 at 9:21 pm
QuickTime tells me it is using H.264.
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:11 am
Wow, QuickTime’s already horrible H.264 encoder used for something it wasn’t really designed for. I really wonder if that’s going to give any results you actually want to use…
September 2nd, 2009 at 1:16 am
If you need a sample I can provide one on Friday when I’m back home; although I guess you can probably find one before that. If you still haven’t on Friday drop me a mail ;)
September 3rd, 2009 at 9:26 am
As a followup: It works well enough but it’s obvious it’s not the best codec for the job – on scrolling on a page of text it’s smooth, very readable but it’s easy to pick out the almost halo like appearance around the text. That’s on top of the H.264 playing back brighter in QuickTime Player by default fun.
Oddly enough the file would not play in VLC.