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SPUY767 said:
Well, since H.264 only plays on macs we can assume macs.

This is not so. I know of several companies who have capabilities to go commercial with h.264 offerings, and I've seen h.264 being played over real player. One of the developers runs a mac, PC with windows and a PC with linux for testing purposes. I can't verify that he's using h.264 on all of his workstations though, I'm just making an assumption on this.

These ATI cards might not be intended for just PC's or Macs. The companies I'm familiar with will predominantly use set top boxes, as opposed to pc's, to deliver a commercial offering.

Trials have already taken place on pc's, and its only the hardware and a few partnership wrangles that is holding back h.264 from being a commercial offering.

My understanding is that the codec itself is still a bit ropey though, and its not just a hardware issue. This is what I've been told by an operations director of a company I'm familiar with. So as far as I'm the problems with H.264 are not just hardware related.

Jay
 
Lacero said:
Are you saying Jimsowden is an idiot? Be very careful. Only mods can call other people idiots.


Point is no one is an idiot. I'm sure not everyone lives on these forums, so I for one dont know the personalities of regular posters either!

Lets put our toys back in the pram children and learn to be nice to one another

Jay
 
wrldwzrd89 said:
Both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray can use a WMV-based codec, H.264, or even a mixture of the two!
And they can also use MPEG2.

Some recent studies have shown that, although h264 is great for getting a high quality video into 1 Mbps & 8Mbps, as the throughput gets to 12Mbps the quality of h264 and mpeg2 are about identical. And at 24Mbps, MPEG2 looks better than h264. This is due to the way frames are encoded in each format, h264 leading to more blurring in high motion scenes.

I was very surprised to read that.

Anyway, if you've got a movie on a 50GB disk and want the best quality, for now that will be MPEG2. On a 9GB DVD h264 gives great HD video which MPEG2 can't get close to.
 
Multi-Rumor Meaning!

There have been lots of rumors flying lately. My guess is that they are all part of the same product soon to be released.

The rumored tablet will sport a top of the line Intel X-scale processor, with an ATI video card making possible full resolution 1080p H.264 playback. This tablet will be the utlimate portable video machine. Featuring a slot load Blue-Ray drive for next generation HD video. A slide in dock that connects to your home HD-TV. iTunes downloadable vidoes. And of course an RF remote for use with the dock :)

This ATI news is the last step to make this machine a reality. :eek:

Just my opinion!!
 
This is fantastic news I'd been considering upgrading my Power Macs 9800XT to a 6800 Ultra DDL or a X800XT, hopefully these are available in a Mac edition sooner rather than later.
 
danielwsmithee said:
There have been lots of rumors flying lately. My guess is that they are all part of the same product soon to be released.

The rumored tablet will sport a top of the line Intel X-scale processor, with an ATI video card making possible full resolution 1080p H.264 playback. This tablet will be the utlimate portable video machine. Featuring a slot load Blue-Ray drive for next generation HD video. A slide in dock that connects to your home HD-TV. iTunes downloadable vidoes. And of course an RF remote for use with the dock :)

This ATI news is the last step to make this machine a reality. :eek:

Just my opinion!!
As awesome as that would be I would love to see a price tag for something with those specs.
 
danielwsmithee said:
There have been lots of rumors flying lately. My guess is that they are all part of the same product soon to be released.

The rumored tablet will sport a top of the line Intel X-scale processor, with an ATI video card making possible full resolution 1080p H.264 playback. This tablet will be the utlimate portable video machine. Featuring a slot load Blue-Ray drive for next generation HD video. A slide in dock that connects to your home HD-TV. iTunes downloadable vidoes. And of course an RF remote for use with the dock :)

This ATI news is the last step to make this machine a reality. :eek:

Just my opinion!!
Not one chance in a million, or at least that's my opinion. ;) In any case, even Steve Jobs has gone on record with his disfavor of portable video devices. The device you describe would be unnecessarily expensive and a poor substitute for a standard HD/SD DVD player.
 
Cheaper Model

fpnc said:
Not one chance in a million, or at least that's my opinion. ;) In any case, even Steve Jobs has gone on record with his disfavor of portable video devices. The device you describe would be unnecessarily expensive and a poor substitute for a standard HD/SD DVD player.

While I agree with you at this point it would be very expensive. You could make it much cheaper by swapping the blue-ray for a normal DVD player, as blue-ray would likely be too expensive this early.

Other then that nothing else would be all that expensive. The ATI card could just be a modified vesion of a cheaper 9250 or so, the actual hardware H.264 decoding would not be that expensive to add. You would not need an X800 for this. The video card could likely cost less then $80. A top of the line X-Scale is still a very cheap processor. I don't see anything in this machine being overly expensive. Sure it would be pricier then a portable DVD player, but only by a few hundred dollars.

ATI will likely be targeting set top boxes as mentioned earlier. This means a basic H.264 decoder not a high end gaming card.
 
Duujo said:
Apple are supporting Blu-ray...

It's funny to see HD-DVD splattered across one of their webpages

http://www.apple.com.au/finalcutstudio/dvdstudiopro/

Apple supports both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. They are on the board for both technologies. Here's a quote from an Apple press release in April:

Apple Press Release said:
Apple is committed to both emerging high definition DVD standards—Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Apple is an active member of the DVD Forum which developed the HD DVD standard, and last month joined the Board of Directors of the Blu-ray Disc Association.
 
locomacg6 said:
They said is for playback....how about encoding video?
Could someone please explain how enconding video works on Tiger with H264.
What do iNeed to have a nice enconding H264 video.
:cool:

What you need is Quicktime Pro 7 and Time, a lot of time ;)
 
Q & A

When a video card supports video decoding, this feature is instantly usable

No. Nvidia promised WMV de-and encoding for the 6XXX series via "Pure video" a long while ago. Still does not work on windows. Also ATIs WMV decoding feature.

Macs are the first machines that support H.264

No. There are at least three codecs for windows that support H.264

Current computers can't play HD videos@1080p

No. Midrange and toplevel single Athlon and Pentium CPUs can play MPEG2, WMV and H.264 videos@1080p without framedrops

Apple will support playback of BD and HD-DVD in near future

Unlikely. To avoid a new DVD CSS desaster, the motion picture industry makes great security demands on hard-and software vendors. Apple does probably not have the resources to fullfill these damands with OS X. Probably Longhorn will be the first and only OS that supports BD and HD-DVD

Kaborka
 
jimsowden said:
I didn't call anyone an idiot. I was being sarcastic, saying I hate people that are negative, in an extreamly negative sentence. I guess that's irony.

The only difference between ironic and sarcastic is the beret.
 
fpnc said:
In any case, even Steve Jobs has gone on record with his disfavor of portable video devices.

... and flash-based music players. I mean, seriously, iPod MEANS hard drive. ;)
 
In addition, it won't be long before nVidia AND ATi have a software solution that will enable current cards to accelerate H.264.

Was this sarcastic as well? If they did this, it would not actually be hardware acceleration...

If there was some superfast way of playing H.264 without a really fast CPU or dedicated hardware that does not yet exist, it would have already been built into the codec (or into Quicktime.)
 
Looking forward to H.264 not requiring $2,000+ hardware to run at nice sizes.

Really digging the direction of video technology...smaller files, bigger resolutions and high def.

Just put it in a nice sub-$1,000 machine and I'll be a happy camper.
 
Kaborka said:
Apple will support playback of BD and HD-DVD in near future

Unlikely. To avoid a new DVD CSS desaster, the motion picture industry makes great security demands on hard-and software vendors. Apple does probably not have the resources to fullfill these damands with OS X. Probably Longhorn will be the first and only OS that supports BD and HD-DVD
While it may not be the near future, and I agree the convergence of computers with HD-DVD/BluRay will be resisted by the studios - the convergence in all these related technologies is happening nevertheless.
 
Wonder Boy said:
i'm pissed i cant install qt 6 on tiger. my qt 6 pro key is useless.
If you still have a copy of your Pro-enabled QuickTime 6 Player that will still work under Tiger and give you all of the Pro features you previously had (and it will support H.264). All you need to do is copy the QT6 Player over to your Tiger system.
 
What we really need is an HW encoder, not a decoder! I can't believe it takes 8 hours to encode an hour of DV footage (2-pass) on a 2GHzx2 G5
 
Kaborka said:
Apple will support playback of BD and HD-DVD in near future

Unlikely. To avoid a new DVD CSS desaster, the motion picture industry makes great security demands on hard-and software vendors. Apple does probably not have the resources to fullfill these damands with OS X. Probably Longhorn will be the first and only OS that supports BD and HD-DVD

Kaborka

I highly doubt that. With Apple having deals with Sony, head of the Blu-ray camp, and being a major member of the DVD forum, I highly doubt Apple wouldn't get BD and HD-DVD support in the OS until after Longhorn. Unless Longhorn launches before 10.5. "ONLY"? Don't be ridiculous. Apple is dedicated to high definition. It would make absolutely no sense for Windows to support HD-DVD and BR-DVD playback and Mac OS X not to when Mac OS X is the #1 video editor's machine.
 
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