HiQual

HiQual is a free utility for setting the high quality flag in DV-compressed QuickTime movies. By default, DV movies do not have this flag set, leading many people to wonder why their DV movies look fine when played to tape, but look so bad on the computer monitor.

The reason for not setting this flag is to get better performance when displaying the video on the computer monitor, but it yields a blocky, blurred image. Today's faster Macs don't really need this performance boost, and can sustain realtime rates even with the high quality flag set.

You can set the high quality flag using QuickTime Player Pro, but it can be a time-consuming task if you need to adjust many movies.

Using HiQual, just drop one or move QuickTime movies onto the application and the high quality flag will immediately be set. You can even use HiQual to clear the flag by just holding down the option key when dropping movies.

Whether or not the high quality flag is set only affects the video when it's displayed on the computer monitor; the image is unchanged when sent over the FireWire connection to a camera or VTR.

Free Download

Download a free copy of HiQual.

System Requirements

HiQual requires a PowerPC- or Intel-based Macintosh running Mac OS 8.6 or later and QuickTime 4.0 or later.

HiQual version 1.1 is fully compatible with OS X.