Still trying to get this MP4 to play...

[Sarcany]

Wait... Why hasn't he simply tied his Twitch account to YouTube to edit on YouTube?
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-t...ube-vidoes

Does he need to add effects?

...

Assuming that there's some reason for him not to edit on YouTube...

Can you describe the method that he's using to download the vids from Twitch? Does he use a particular app for this?

...Also:

N-OS X-tasy! is right. If the Mac is so underpowered for what he'd doing, you should be talking to him about how he's going to finance his own new Mac.

[M A V I C]

N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
[quote=N-OS X-tasy!]
M A V I C, you’re old enough now to know better than to waste time tilting at windmills. I guarantee it would have taken your kid less time to figure out how to use VLC than you’ve spent chasing down a solution to this “problem.”

We’re supposed to get wiser as we get older, pal.

And I probably shouldn't have assumed you all know what Twitch is He likes to make recordings while he plays video games, then edit them and upload to his YT channel. It's a continual thing. He's been bugging me for weeks to fix it. If he uses VLC to transcode, the drive will fill up. Plus when he's not on it, his sister or mom are on it so it can't be dog slow while they're using it.
I know what Twitch is. :RollingEyesSmiley5:

The scenario you described in your last post is ENTIRELY DIFFERENT than that described in your original post — now we’re talking about recording, editing and uploading, not just downloading and viewing.

Given all the other considerations and concerns you’ve cited, I think your best move is to upgrade the family MBA to an M1 model with some external storage added.
Yes, I wasn't fully explaining it. Sorry.

[M A V I C]

Sarcany wrote:
Wait... Why hasn't he simply tied his Twitch account to YouTube to edit on YouTube?
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-t...ube-vidoes

Does he need to add effects?

...

Assuming that there's some reason for him not to edit on YouTube...

Can you describe the method that he's using to download the vids from Twitch? Does he use a particular app for this?

...Also:

N-OS X-tasy! is right. If the Mac is so underpowered for what he'd doing, you should be talking to him about how he's going to finance his own new Mac.

He goes into his account and hits download.

I know he adds extra effects in iMovie. It was editing just fine before a month or so ago.

[Filliam H. Muffman]

Restore from a backup from when it was working (...sorry).

Backup the current image on son's machine, then clone the OS from a working machine.

[M A V I C]

I think my next step is to do a clean install on an external drive and see if it has the same issue.

[mikebw]

M A V I C wrote:
The other challenge is transcoding creates a lot larger files than the original.

Just want to clear this up- transcoding by definition takes a file of one format and re-encodes it into another. It does not always mean larger!

One could easily take a file and make it smaller, trouble is the files we tend to consume and deliver are already encoded at low bitrates to conserve space, so to make it smaller you would need to lower the bitrate even more undoubtedly affecting the image quality.

Of course if you mean to edit a file it might make sense to transcode to a less compressed format do reduce the load on your CPU, but as you correctly noted this does increase the file size!

[M A V I C]

mikebw wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
The other challenge is transcoding creates a lot larger files than the original.

Just want to clear this up- transcoding by definition takes a file of one format and re-encodes it into another. It does not always mean larger!

One could easily take a file and make it smaller, trouble is the files we tend to consume and deliver are already encoded at low bitrates to conserve space, so to make it smaller you would need to lower the bitrate even more undoubtedly affecting the image quality.

Of course if you mean to edit a file it might make sense to transcode to a less compressed format do reduce the load on your CPU, but as you correctly noted this does increase the file size!
I took the file, used VLC to transcode it to the same resolution, frame rate and bitrate as the source. I chose to copy the audio since it worked fine. The output file was nearly 3x as large. Both were h.264. I didn't dig in enough to figure out why it was that much bigger, but since this will be a repeated process and it works on other machines and it used to work on this machine, I'd like to avoid the transcoding process.

[hal]

M A V I C wrote:
I think my next step is to do a clean install on an external drive and see if it has the same issue.

try a new user account first, but a complete nuke & pave is what I'm thinking now.

[M A V I C]

hal wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
I think my next step is to do a clean install on an external drive and see if it has the same issue.

try a new user account first, but a complete nuke & pave is what I'm thinking now.
It stopped working under his account. So I tried mine for the first time, and it didn't work there either. Do you think a completely new user account would make a difference?

[Sarcany]

M A V I C wrote:
He goes into his account and hits download.

Through the Video Producer? Gotcha.

That should export native-resolution h.264 mp4 files... Hmmm... Has your son recently switched to a better camera or display or toggled a setting on Twitch to up the resolution of his streams?

What I'm wondering is whether the resolution of his files in h.264 is too great for QuickTime to render without the native video acceleration of a more recent Mac.

That would explain the black screens. If it's the lack of GPU that's the problem, sometimes, if you sit there watching for a minute or two, or jog/shuttle around, you can get it to render a frame.That's a sure sign that the processor simply isn't up to the job.