h264 slowness

[mattraehl]

Some people really aren't getting the big picture here.

First, the clips that some people are complaining about are HD clips. Keep that in mind. Do you actually comprehend what it takes to do full quality playback of HD video? These aren't the little 320x240 video clips that we're used to downloading from the internet, folks. You have to be crazy to expect a lot of older hardware to be able to play these things. HD video isn't about shoestringing the stuff into old hardware, it is about creating video content for new hardware and the future. When DVD came out, could you just pop it into any old CD player and expect it to play? No. It was new technology that required bigger and better technology to take advantage of it. Same with HD video content. Anybody who is pissed at Apple because they aren't making HD video play on your old 1GHz G4 processor simply does not understand the situation.

As well, H.264 does not equal HD video. They aren't the same thing. H.264 is a new version of MPEG4 that can be scaled from small video and file sizes up to high definition video. H.264 makes it possible to easily present HD video in file sizes sane enough to distribute over the internet or other means, but that is not H.264's sole purpose. For example, I just last night encoded a music video off of a DVD into H.264. Using H.264, I ended up with a video that was 640x480 and 55MB in size, compared to the old version of the same video encoded in MPEG1 that was 320x240 and 88MB in size. While H.264 can be used for HD video, it can also be used for things like that where you want bigger resolution, better video quality, and smaller file sizes for non-HD content.

Finally, to hit the point again, anybody who is wanting Apple to "fix" H.264 video, especially HD video, to work on older computers does not understand the situation. H.264 is not Apple's codec, for starters. Beyond that, "fixing" it would defeat the entire point of H.264. The purpose of the codec is to get better quality video files than what we had before. To achieve that, better hardware is required. If you want to dumb down H.264 to play on any machine, then just use an older, less capable codec instead.

Thank you slipping some intelligence into this thread. Here is a good way for people to think about this: DVD at it's native resolution does not even take up the full screen on my 1024x768 iBook. These videos people are watching (From Apple's website) are of a massively higher quality (HD) than the current DVD movies. The SMALLER version of these videos is much larger than DVD. The larger versions are ~1MB/s. 7200 seconds for a 2 hour movie makes about 7GB of movie, which would fit on current commercial DVDs. So we are getting massively increased quality without massively increased storage requirements. If you want super-high quality videos of this size that run on your computer.... well, like shidoshi said, go download them in some older, inferior codec. But good luck, because you're looking at some long downloads.

 

[heynsmd2]

Fantastic on my Powerbook 1.5 --- Much better (as stated above) than DVD! Full screen and ability to save makes QT7 Pro worth it...

The frame rate varies between about 12 to 20 (but mostly hovers around the late teens (17 - 18) and at times goes up to about 24). Even when the rate is down to 12 clarity is still amazing and doesn't appear noticably choppy. Downloaded one 1080 bbc file but that is unusable on the PB, besides it is so big it doesn't nearly fit into the screen.

This 'year of HD' is going to be a good one! I'm glad there is technology out there that pushes Apple on the hardware side

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Powerbook G4 1.5, ATI 128MB, 5200rpm HDD, 10.3.9