Old Video Formats for the Chop

1 Apr 2019 17:57:25

Tony Still

Apple has published a list of media formats (mostly video) that macOS will no longer support after Mojave. Part of the removal of support is the demise of the old QuickTime 7 media player (that some of us also bought a Pro licence for many years ago): QT7 is much more capable than the current QT Player and provides some of the old formats (codecs).

Full lists of the formats that will be supported and not supported are on an Apple Support page. If you have important elderly media files then now is the time to convert them to some more modern format; just make sure that you minimise any loss of quality by careful choice of the new format.

I'm personally sorry to see the demise of JPEG 2000, an improved version of JPEG that I don't think anyone ever used.

Re: Old Video Formats for the Chop

6 Apr 2019 12:47:16

Rick Churchill

I read the Apple support page where it lists the formats which will and will not be supported but I do not know how to find these files. (I do not have Final Cut Pro with a library of files)

There is a list of incompatible formats which contain names e.g. "Sorensen Spark" but no list of suffixes for example ".mov". How is it possible to scan my computer to find the files which will not be supported in the future?

Re: Old Video Formats for the Chop

6 Apr 2019 15:32:07

Tony Still

The latest iMovie release claims the same ability to search but I suspect it only searches its own library.

A Finder search by typing "kind:movie" in the search box of a Finder window shows a number of types of video file here but you'd have to test to see if it's exhaustive.

You could look here if you want to search for particular extensions (use "kind:ttt" where ttt is the file extension (without the dot)).

Re: Old Video Formats for the Chop

6 Apr 2019 15:45:04

Mick Burrell

Or don't update beyond Mojave 😉

Re: Old Video Formats for the Chop

7 Apr 2019 10:30:41

Rick Churchill

The problem was that Apple haven't published the suffix of the unsupported formats and only declared that Final Cut pro would alert us to future incompatibility however thank you Tony for advising that iMovie has the same capability.

Looking at the movies on the Mac hard drive there is only one odd one with a VOB suffix. I can now move this file into the iMovie library and try it. The rest of my video files are on a separate drive and I would have to see if there are any other odd ones there. I would only have to move a representative file in to check compatibility.

Yes Mick I knew it would all go wrong after we scrapped our Apple IIs! It is amazing what you can do with 48k of memory - land a spaceship on the moon.