H.264 HD is AMAZING ( 56K Warning Includes pics)

[robbieduncan]

So I guess Powerbooks are out? that sucks. Wondering if I can play it on my 1.33 powerbook especially since it has only 64mb vram

I don't think it's a VRAM issue as much as a CPU issue. On the 720p trailers I see around 15fps on my PowerBook (1.25Ghz). CPU is maxed out the whole time. I think a really fast G4 might just about make it, but with the amout of data flying around I think that a 2Ghz G4 (were it available) would struggle unless it was on a fater front side bus than is currently available

 

[confirmed]

personally i think Apple could implement some sort of pre-decoding, for slower machines. You could watch a mov, just like now, in real-time with the possibility of dropped frames, or you could select a pre-decode option in Quicktime, where it would decode the mov to cache before you watch it.. therefore being able to watch anything on the slowest of computers, as long as you have the patience.

i understand that apple wants you to see this beautiful video and want to buy a new computer that can actually play it.. but with that not even being an option in their portable line, i think they need to pre-decode. and if Apple wants to be able to start a Movie Store anytime in the next 2 years, they have to have this.. otherwise they'll have a very small customer base.

 

[NeoMayhem]

personally i think Apple could implement some sort of pre-decoding, for slower machines. You could watch a mov, just like now, in real-time with the possibility of dropped frames, or you could select a pre-decode option in Quicktime, where it would decode the mov to cache before you watch it.. therefore being able to watch anything on the slowest of computers, as long as you have the patience.

i understand that apple wants you to see this beautiful video and want to buy a new computer that can actually play it.. but with that not even being an option in their portable line, i think they need to pre-decode. and if Apple wants to be able to start a Movie Store anytime in the next 2 years, they have to have this.. otherwise they'll have a very small customer base.

You can always decode it yourself, but the resulting file will be huge, probably over 2gb for the trailers they posted.

 

[confirmed]

i know you could do it yourself.. but what i'm talking about would put the decoded file into cache, which would get removed as needed. Apple could even use a lossless intermediate codec, possibly cutting the file by half. put half of that into memory (as available) and half on the hard drive.

with a 100MB trailer, it takes over a minute to download with most broadband connections. if Quicktime could use this time to start processing the decode, it'd get enough of a head start to properly play the movie.

 

[killmoms]

Even a lossless compression codec like PNG makes files whose data rate is too high to play, at least on my PowerBook's hard drive. I should know—I spat out both Pixlet and PNG versions of the 1280 x 544 Serenity trailer to try and play them smoothly. It ended up the only way to get them to play nicely on my PowerBook was to pop 'em over to the PC, encode to high-bitrate XviD (losing quality) and send 'em back over to play in VLC (which is damned dodgy on Tiger, isn't it?). Ah well.

 

[sorryiwasdreami]

Can someone give me a link to the H.264 previews? Are they the movie trailers on the Apple site?

 

[robbieduncan]

Can someone give me a link to the H.264 previews? Are they the movie trailers on the Apple site?

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/

 

[Lacero]

I think the H.264 codec will go through further optimizations so it's likely to play in older G4s. That happened with Quicktime 4 > Quicktime 5 where Apple optimized the DV codec, providing higher quality and faster encode/decode performance.

As it stands now, Apple's H.264 could be better, so you're not seeing fully what this codec can do.

 

[Sun Baked]

I don't think it's a VRAM issue as much as a CPU issue. On the 720p trailers I see around 15fps on my PowerBook (1.25Ghz). CPU is maxed out the whole time. I think a really fast G4 might just about make it, but with the amout of data flying around I think that a 2Ghz G4 (were it available) would struggle unless it was on a fater front side bus than is currently available

Here is a table of some of the people running the trailers.

Would be interesting to find out how somebody with a dual G4 and a high end video card did -- but I haven't dug through all the threads either.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Man I wish people would stop whinning about the h.264 files. Apple is presenting people w/a glimpse of the future, not a new solution for today. These files are meant to show what can be done, how video over the internet can look in the future. It's not like they are going to drop all of their current low-res QT trailers and replace them all w/HD trailers.



Lethal

 

[BornAgainMac]

Playing H.264 is nothing like encoding H.264. It is really slow to encode on even a Powermac G5. For example, 10 minutes for 1 minute of video. I wonder if CoreVideo can be used for encoding video someday.

 

[Lacero]

No different when I encoded MPEG2 files in Bitvice on my old 867Mhz G4 Quicksilver. It took 12 minutes to encode 1 minute on the best settings. Now I use Compressor on my dual G5 and now it takes 1.5 minutes to encode 1 minute on the best settings.

It will take 3-4 years for computers to be fast enough to encode HD H.264 video at a 1:1 ratio.

 

[Makosuke]

I'm a little surprised about how worked up people are getting considering that this is A) A 1.0 release, so to speak (meaning there may be at least some room for optimization on slower processors) and more importantly B) Almost nobody even has a monitor that runs at these kinds of resolution yet.

New-ish Powerbooks should be able to just handle 1280X720p@24fps, which is already 3X DV resolution, good enough to qualify as HDTV, and pretty dang nice looking. So it takes a dual G5 to play 1920X1080p; you need a good 23" widescreen monitor to even handle that resolution--it's bigger than my 20" widescreen! Even many "HDTV ready" TVs can't handle resolution that high.

Most people just don't have that kind of display gear yet, and by the time it's common, so will computers that can decode it in software. Besides, what really counts is that HD-DVDs should be using H.264 (isn't that correct?), and so long as the hardware decoder chip in your set-top player can handle it, you're good to go.

Plan for the future, not for today.

 

[Phat_Pat]

Playing H.264 is nothing like encoding H.264. It is really slow to encode on even a Powermac G5. For example, 10 minutes for 1 minute of video. I wonder if CoreVideo can be used for encoding video someday.

Yeah i made the mistake as exporting a hour film from FCP HD in the H.264 formatt. When over an hour passed by and it was barly over 10% i caught on........

 

[dav]

I'm not feelin' this H.264 thing yet.. It makes me feel already obsolete

 

[sorryiwasdreami]

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/

Thanks! ...and WOW!

 

[enclave]

Thanks! ...and WOW!

Ok as a video editor I have 1 major concern,

If I can't even PLAY a h.264 1080 movie file. how the hell am I going to EDIT the damn thing and watch it back in FCP?

Can someone PLEASE explain to me how I could possible justify buying a new HD camera and cutting it on my g4?

Am I missing something here?

 

[jsw]

Regardless of the CPU required (and a year of code optimization and CPU improvements will mean that basically every new Mac will support it by sometime in 2006), this is truly a glimpse into the future of transmitted video. The relatively small files are impressive, and the video quality is amazing - pause a movie, and it looks like a hi-res photo.

I'm very impressed.

 

[jsw]

Ok as a video editor I have 1 major concer,


If I can't even PLAY a h.264 1080 movie file. how the hell am I going to EDIT the damn thing and watch it back in FCP?

Can someone PLEASE explain to me how I could possible justify buying a new HD camera and cutting it on my g4?

Am I missing something here?

You won't be able to do it with H.264. I'd assume you could do it with a different codec, but HD video is going to wreak havoc on a 12" PB, no matter how you slice it and dice it.

 

[enclave]

You won't be able to do it with H.264. I'd assume you could do it with a different codec, but HD video is going to wreak havoc on a 12" PB, no matter how you slice it and dice it.

Sigh... I guess it's time for the dual g5... goodbye wallet.....

So can someone give me an acurate file size for around 2 hours of hd video from a hd camera?
Will I need terrabytes of space to work with?

 

[Mechcozmo]

personally i think Apple could implement some sort of pre-decoding, for slower machines. You could watch a mov, just like now, in real-time with the possibility of dropped frames, or you could select a pre-decode option in Quicktime, where it would decode the mov to cache before you watch it.. therefore being able to watch anything on the slowest of computers, as long as you have the patience.

Like buffering, but not from the internet?

Playing H.264 is nothing like encoding H.264. It is really slow to encode on even a Powermac G5. For example, 10 minutes for 1 minute of video. I wonder if CoreVideo can be used for encoding video someday.

I encoded a VIDEO_TS file to H.264 and it took and hour and a half... for a single scene out of it. 18 minutes, hazzah!
12" 1.33GHz G4, 768MB of RAM, 80GB HD.
Turns out I didn't even need that file.... but it looked pretty good!

 

[Kingsnapped]

A lot of people are missing the true beauty of h264. Videos that used to take 10-30mb on my website are now 1-2mb with fair fullscreen quality. This allowed me to put a lot more on the website, and allow viewers to get at them much more quickly.

Now I just have to wait for QT7 to get to Windows, so the internet doesn't get pissed about my "broken" movie section...

 

[admanimal]

A lot of people are missing the true beauty of h264. Videos that used to take 10-30mb on my website are now 1-2mb with fair fullscreen quality. This allowed me to put a lot more on the website, and allow viewers to get at them much more quickly.

Now I just have to wait for QT7 to get to Windows, so the internet doesn't get pissed about my "broken" movie section...

Exactly! HD is only one extreme of what H.264 is good for. On the other end, it enables good quality video to be played back on smaller, less powerful devices (cell phones and no doubt a future iPod).

 

[Passante]

Here is a table of some of the people running the trailers.

Would be interesting to find out how somebody with a dual G4 and a high end video card did -- but I haven't dug through all the threads either.

I got a constant 24 fps (batman trailer) on my MDD DP 1.25 G4 with a Radeon 9800.

 

[rendezvouscp]

While the h.264 HD videos are extremely awesome (I'm absolutely loving my PM G5 right now), h.264 has a lot of potential elsewhere. I'm looking forward to QT 7 for Windows so that I too can convert all of my videos on my website over into h.264 (I believe I'm currently using h.263) for better quality at smaller file sizes.

One more thing: the other day I let my PM encode The Moulin Rouge into h.264 and it came out absolutely stunning, even at a meager 1774.42 kbits/sec. Overall, the over-two-hour-movie came out at about 1.5 GB. Stunning!
-Chase