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

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.