Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Enable QuickTime's legacy codecs

Oh dear Apple,

Thank you so much for trying to usher us forward by limiting the number of codecs that default to being available on a new installation of QT Pro... But what you don't know is that YOU'RE SCREWING WITH MY ESTABLISHED WORKFLOWS!!!

To everyone who still cares about older QT codecs like Motion JPEG and Sorrenson, because they are what your client asks for, but can't find them in the QT export menu, don't fret. They're still there, just hidden. The problem is that the process to enable them has changed dependent on your operating system.

As I Googled to find the process I aggregated all of these solutions for different OSs.

Mac OSX 10.5.8 Leopard;
System Preferences > QuickTime > Advanced
check the "Show legacy encoders"
2.66 Dual MacPro, Mac OS X (10.5.8), FCS 3


Mac OS X v 10.6.5;
FCP v 7.0.3
I have both QT v 7.6.6 and QT v 10.0 (118) installed.
The solution for enable legacy codecs in QT/Snow Leopard open aTerminal window and type:

qtdefaults write LegacyCodecsEnabled yes

More to come. Comment if you have solutions for other OSs, like Windows. I think it's still a checkbox on a preferences tab there.