XO Wave: Working with MPEG-2 Video Files in XO Wave (Technical Note)

Important Notice: Although XO Wave will continue to be available for some time, it will be discontinued as we prepare to bring you the next generation Digital Audio Workstation. The new software we are developing is called Xonami and it will have many, but not all, of the features of XO Wave. A discount upgrade path will be available for users who purchased XO Wave September 1^st, 2010.

We realize that there are few professional CD mastering options with the full range of capabilities offered by XO Wave, so we will continue to offer the package as long as possible. However, please keep in mind that as discontinued software:

This site may not contain up-to-date information.
Technical Support will be discontinued on November 30th.

For up-to-date information about our upcoming software, please join our mailing list.

This technical note briefly describes how work with MPEG-2 files in XO Wave on Mac OS X. MPEG-2 is a high-quality video codec most commonly used on DVDs, and also in video and television post-production. It is a cousin of MPEG-4 video (which is common on the web), the AAC audio format, and the venerable MP3 audio format (which is actually MPEG-1, Layer 3). MPEG-2 is is well suited to very high-quality video. You are most likely to encounter MPEG-2 in post-production work, such as sound for video work for DVD.

To get started, you will need two things. First, the MPEG-2 playback component for QuickTime. At the time of this writing, it cost $19.99 and is available for download and installation immediately after purchase (customers who have an older version of the plug-in can download an updated Universal Binary version for free from store.apple.com). Next, you'll need a tool to "demux", or demultiplex, the MPEG-2 streams because third-party applications (including XO Wave) cannot use QuickTime to read multiplexed MPEG-2 files. An excellent tool that can demux an MPEG-2 file and much more is MPEG Streamclip, available free from Squared 5.

Once you've installed these tools according to their instructions, you can watch MPEG-2 videos in QuickTime Player and use MPEG Streamclip to demux MPEG-2 files. To demux a file, open it in MPEG Streamclip and select File:Demux to M2V. The output file will contain the video data (no audio) from the original movie and can be opened in XO Wave. Alternatively, you can also select File:Demux to M2V and AIFF if you want to import the audio from the MPEG-2 into XO Wave as well. (Of course, if your file is already demuxed, XO Wave will load the video-only stream directly, and there is no need to demux with MPEG Streamclip. You'll still need the MPEG-2 playback component from Apple, though.)

Note that when opening MPEG-2 video files, or preparing them for display in many programs (including XO Wave), the program may become unresponsive for a few moments while loading the file. In XO Wave, this means you may have to wait a few seconds after you open a new Edit or Movie window.