I’ve spent a lot of time these last few days studying up on audio and video compression and that sort of fun stuff. And I appreciate Compressor more than I ever have before. The sheer flexibility this thing has is just nuts, and the workflow is so simple: And jobs to your batch, give each job a source file, and one or more targets. Each target has a settings and a destination. You can save presets that you just drag onto the job and the immediately load up a target. You can select multiple jobs in a batch and and drag a target to one, and it will add it to all of them. Then you fire off the batch. Coolest part: if you have multiple Macs, it can fan the batch out across all of them. If it doesn’t have enough targets to keep all the CPUs in the cluster busy, it will start chopping videos into chunks and letting them process individually. Makes me wish I had more than one…:D 
*evil laugh*
Oh, and it has about a cajillion formats. There are dedicated 3G, MPEG-4 layer-2, MPEG-2, Dolby Digital, and MP3 encoders included, plus it can use ANYTHING Quicktime supports. (H.264, ProRes, XDCAM, AAC, AIC, DV, and litterally dozens of others. QT’s encoder drop-down is over 1000px tall. If you are still missing something, Quicktime can be easily expanded with plug-ins. There are ones out there for WMV, Flash, DTS, Silverlight and more. This brings us to my main point. That would be XiphQT. It is badly in need of attention.
For those not aware, there is a new standard for web formating called HTML5. One of the very cool new tricks it has are the and tags. These tags allow one to easily embed streaming audio and video just like you would a pic. The problem came about as to which format to use. Nobody could agree. It was narrowed down to 2: One side, team Free Software: Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio. On the other, team We-have-standard-codecs-already: MPEG-4′s H.264 video and AAC audio. Chrome currently supports both. FF only supports Ogg. Safari just uses Quicktime. Quicktime…..does not support Ogg out of the box. That is where XiphQT comes in. For the playback side, it handles things nicely.
Preparing video is another story. Nobody actually makes video professionally with free software. It just sucks. In fact, if you go to the Free Software Foundation site, and look at their “Projects in need” page, one of the first ones is for better video production tools. On the non-free side, Apple Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere use….Quicktime. QT has lots of support for the MPEG-4 codecs. In fact, it supports them without paid add-ons. If you have OS X, they are supported out of the box. On Windows, you only need to install Quicktime to get the same support. If you have iTunes, it’s already installed. Theora, is as mentioned, not supported. XiphQT to the rescue! Kind of.
Here is the trouble. Exporting Ogg video from Compressor is a royal pain the ass. The internets claims XiphQT makes it possible. You can definitely make a preset for Theora video. Except I still don’t know why Vorbis audio doesn’t work. QT just pukes up errors.
While I still have hope of being able to make H.264 and Theora streams from one job in Compressor, I am a techy and a persevering type. Many others would have just said “FUCK THIS SHIT” by this point. QMaster is enough a pain in the ass. Compressor doesn’t need tempermental codecs to join the party. We use Macs because we need our shit to “just work”. Sure, no system is perfect. But with H.264 you just load up and go. That’s not the case with Theora, and when people start asking for this format from places prepping their video for the web, they will start meeting resistance.
Oh, and XiphQT has still not been upgraded to the FAR more efficient v1.1 Theora encoder, meaning any video it spits out will be 30-50% bigger than it needs to be.
