New High Quality Video Codec (h.264)

[obeygiant]

Blue-ray

This is great news. Apple will have native support for two out of 3 mandatory codecs for the next HiDef specification(these are VC9 from Microsloth, AVC and MPEG2)[/QUOTE]

This is a blue-ray disc and player. A format I doubt Apple will adopt due
to the cartidge. But I do hope they adopt the toshiba codec.

 

[BornAgainMac]

SW Trailer

QT 7.5 maybe. SW Ep. III isnt out until summer 2005.

The trailer should come out long before the summer of 2005. No dialog, just cut scenes and action and slicing and dicing. I expect the new trailer in the fall.

 

[musicpyrite]

They already ship dual layer burners in the powermacs. The Pioneer A-07 drive has been demonstrated by pioneer as being able to burn dual layer disc with a firmware update that is coming this summer.

The next revision will probably have this as an advertisesd feauture since manufacturers will have these drives shipping in may and june which matches up for wwdc.

Good to know, mate. Thank you for enlightening me.

 

[Laslo Panaflex]

I haven't read the whole thread, but just to let those interested know, they had a demo of this at the Apple booth at NAB. It was VERY impressive, in fact, they were showing native HD resolution files, that were incoded with the codec, and I could tell no difference, it still looked HD. In fact the Apple rep at the booth said that they gave the compressed HD footage to the FCPHD testers without telling them it was conpressed, and they couldn't tell either. The compressed version of the HD Harry Potter 3 trailer that they were showing was about 190 megs in size. The file was 2 minutes long and had a resolution of 1920X1440. It was very very impressive, and puts M$'s HD compression codec to shame.

 

[tortoise]

I've been using H.264 for a while...

It is a very slick codec, and can put 1920x1200 HD (e.g. D5) into a very nice 4-5 Mbit stream. For comparison, H.264 (aka MPEG AVC) can put a DVD equivalent video signal into about 1-1.5 Mbit. In other words, it represents an integer factor improvement in compression for a given quality level. So with this codec they can fit very high resolution video onto a standard DVD format.

The downside is that H.264 requires BRUTAL quantities of CPU. If you are looking for a new use to max out the CPU on your spiffy new G5, H.264 encoding will do it, and decoding is only marginally better, at least at high resolutions. Most consumer PCs currently do not have the horsepower (nor bus) to do a high-res decode without dedicated silicon pulling some weight.

H.264 is a great thing, but it will take a while to really hit the market for consumer purposes until good encoder/decoder ASICs are widely available. You can't just throw an embedded CPU at it and expect it to work, as it requires far more beef than MPEG-2, and high-res vanilla MPEG-4 ASP starts to strain many systems.

 

[hookemhorns]

QT7 is Coming

This dude at AI nailed everything that was announced at NAB - down to the feature sets, by and large. I would assume his predictions for QT7 are largely acurate, too.

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?threadid=40808

 

[SuperChuck]

How about a new QTVR Studio?

As a web designer, I have been really disappointed by Apple's seeming disinterest in Quicktime Virtual Reality Studio. To my knowledge, the thing hasn't been updated since the OS9 days, and though I'm sure it would run just fine in Classic layer, there's no way I'm dishing out money on an app that I have to boot up Classic for. ESPECIALLY not an Apple app. It's shocking they are selling a non-OS X native app.

Hopefully, this news will bring about QT 6.6/7, and a new QTVR Studio along with it.

 

[stoid]

This dude at AI nailed everything that was announced at NAB - down to the feature sets, by and large. I would assume his predictions for QT7 are largely acurate, too.

http://forums.appleinsider.com/showthread.php?threadid=40808

Unfortunately, he didn't direct any time frame onto the QT7 predictions. We all know Apple is working on something... we just don't know when we'll see it. My money is on WWDC for a preview of QT7 to be included with Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger?).

 

[stimpy13]

What would like to see

A new format is great but there is a heck of a lot of video out there and quicktime can't play a fair portion of it....

The single most important problem i have with supporting installed QT is the video format issue. For gods sake take a page from the open source community and please add support for EVERY format that you can find!!.. if it can be played on windows then QT should be able to PLAY it.

the first "user" response when QT can't play a video clip is that " QT sucks" or "QT is broken"...the bottom line is that end user does not care about the fact that the clip was compressed with an older codec (IV3 or IV50) or some of the stranger codecs ( MP43) ...the end user does not care and does not want to to know. And the end user will stick with the player that opens the most clip the fist time.

Want quick time to outrun Windows media player ? Then develop a reputation as a work horse, "fits all solution". QT should play it all...end story

and i agree with the following in spades...

AVC support is a step in the right direction but it's time that QT became
much more modern. QT is the reason why Final Cut Pro can playback 24 tracks of audio but cannot capture more than a stereo track.

I'm hoping to see QT become better at multitasking and it's core revamped. Who cares if it breaks legacy apps to a certain extend. QT 7 needs to be the new foundation for multimedia on Macs.

Apple will also need to support MPEG2 Transport Streams for easy HDV support for Final Cut Pro 5 and other video apps. How about improved scalers and deinterlacing? Audio should be beefed up to handle infinite Audio Ins limited only by hardware.

Hell add OpenGl and the ability to handle overlays and other broadcast effects right in QT. Imagine if QT gave developers the base features to create Home Theater PC applications very easily. That would rock. I have high hope for Apple with QT.

Plus document it very well and push it for developers. You know the first Multimedia wave was a joke by todays standards. We were happy then to have sound video and computer graphics all in one place. Today multimedia means surround sound, 3D and robust video. It's time to get QT caught up

 

[greg75]

It was very very impressive, and puts M$'s HD compression codec to shame.

The majority of the DVD Forum's members rated WMV9 as having better quality than H.264. They must have been bribed by Microsoft

 

[MrMacMan]

yes indeed. what would be great is if H264 could replace Xvid and divx.. I don't know too much about this stuff, but if I understood what people are saying here, the 264 could do this. The fact is that the quicktime mpeg4 is horrible compared to xvid, but I guess they are for a bit different purposes anyway.

My point is (if there really is one) that I'd like Quicktime to be my primary player again (instead of MPlayer, which is nice, but not as nice as quicktime), but I need to be able to encode my movies to a reasonable size (I rather don't use the DVD.. much easier just to doubleclick a file) so that I can still watch them with QT without any hassle.

Oh yeah me too.

Xvid and Divx totally blow MPEG-4 away.


Recent tests prove it, with picture results.



I haven't seen a video at this type of quality yet...

Are their sample videos?

 

[iGuy]

slightly off topic, but relevant

They already ship dual layer burners in the powermacs. The Pioneer A-07 drive has been demonstrated by pioneer as being able to burn dual layer disc with a firmware update that is coming this summer.

The next revision will probably have this as an advertisesd feauture since manufacturers will have these drives shipping in may and june which matches up for wwdc.

As I understand it, the original superdrive was an A05.

I recently purchased and installed an A06 to replace my DVD RAM drive in my sawtooth single processor 500MHz G4.

At that time I couldn't find any reference on US sites to the A06. I'm wondering if an A06 was released in the US or is the A06 a canadain model number for what is an A07 in the US?

If so it would seem that my A06 will be able to burn dual layers with the aforementioned firmware update. Or am I out of luck?

~iGuy

 

[iGuy]

A06 burns +R

the a-07 drive can burn 4.7gb dvd-r and dvd+r discs, but macs cannot currently tap the +r technology until this firmware update you mention.

however, these are both single-layer discs. dual layer discs can hold about 9gb of data... the first burners for these are just coming out and have yet to be standard issue in any consumer system offered by apple. yet...

I can burn to DVD +R disks with my A06 using Panther (10.3.3). I can read them back too. That's always a good thing.

~iGuy

 

[jlneemidge]

Oh yeah me too.

Xvid and Divx totally blow MPEG-4 away.

xvid and divx are both implementations of the MPEG-4 standard. What you meant to say was that xvid and divx totally blow Apple's MPEG-4 implementation away, which I agree with. Don't confuse any one implementation with the standard.

 

[omnivector]

A new format is great but there is a heck of a lot of video out there and quicktime can't play a fair portion of it....

The single most important problem i have with supporting installed QT is the video format issue. For gods sake take a page from the open source community and please add support for EVERY format that you can find!!.. if it can be played on windows then QT should be able to PLAY it.

the first "user" response when QT can't play a video clip is that " QT sucks" or "QT is broken"...the bottom line is that end user does not care about the fact that the clip was compressed with an older codec (IV3 or IV50) or some of the stranger codecs ( MP43) ...the end user does not care and does not want to to know. And the end user will stick with the player that opens the most clip the fist time.

Want quick time to outrun Windows media player ? Then develop a reputation as a work horse, "fits all solution". QT should play it all...end story

and i agree with the following in spades...

AVC support is a step in the right direction but it's time that QT became
much more modern. QT is the reason why Final Cut Pro can playback 24 tracks of audio but cannot capture more than a stereo track.

I'm hoping to see QT become better at multitasking and it's core revamped. Who cares if it breaks legacy apps to a certain extend. QT 7 needs to be the new foundation for multimedia on Macs.

Apple will also need to support MPEG2 Transport Streams for easy HDV support for Final Cut Pro 5 and other video apps. How about improved scalers and deinterlacing? Audio should be beefed up to handle infinite Audio Ins limited only by hardware.

Hell add OpenGl and the ability to handle overlays and other broadcast effects right in QT. Imagine if QT gave developers the base features to create Home Theater PC applications very easily. That would rock. I have high hope for Apple with QT.

Plus document it very well and push it for developers. You know the first Multimedia wave was a joke by todays standards. We were happy then to have sound video and computer graphics all in one place. Today multimedia means surround sound, 3D and robust video. It's time to get QT caught up

i couldn't agree more. mplayer is my default for EVERY single media format. one thing that pisses me off about setting default applications in os x is you set them by file extention, not MIME type. thus i have to set mplayer for both mpg and mpeg, which is annoying.

 

[Doctor Q]

I haven't read the whole thread, but just to let those interested know, they had a demo of this at the Apple booth at NAB. It was VERY impressive, in fact, they were showing native HD resolution files, that were incoded with the codec, and I could tell no difference, it still looked HD. In fact the Apple rep at the booth said that they gave the compressed HD footage to the FCPHD testers without telling them it was conpressed, and they couldn't tell either. The compressed version of the HD Harry Potter 3 trailer that they were showing was about 190 megs in size. The file was 2 minutes long and had a resolution of 1920X1440. It was very very impressive, and puts M$'s HD compression codec to shame.

Confirmed. I talked to someone who got the same demo. He deals with codecs for a living, and he was very impressed.

 

[elmimmo]

Personally I do not understand the hype of this except for QT's ability to DECODE the streams. Quality when compressing to a certain standard, at this modern days, has been repeatedly demonstrated to be so dependent on the implementation being used. As has been said xvid and divx kick Apple's implementation of the same standard, as does LAME mp3 encoder to Apple's iTunes (OTOH iTunes is blazing fast). I do not understand why everyone is so convinced that QT's ENCODING abilities will be worth a penny after seeing what Apple did with MPEG4.

 

[danman]

Personally I do not understand the hype of this except for QT's ability to DECODE the streams. Quality when compressing to a certain standard, at this modern days, has been repeatedly demonstrated to be so dependent on the implementation being used. As has been said xvid and divx kick Apple's implementation of the same standard, as does LAME mp3 encoder to Apple's iTunes (OTOH iTunes is blazing fast). I do not understand why everyone is so convinced that QT's ENCODING abilities will be worth a penny after seeing what Apple did with MPEG4.

Actually, Quicktime's encoding of MP3s is very good indeed, and its encoding of MPEG4 audio (AAC) is arguably one of the best available.

It is only the encoding of MPEG4 Video that lets it down so horribly.

 

[Dippo]

I am not sure if more CPU intensive compression is the way to go.

The speed increases in bandwidth and the size increases in storage are out stripping CPU speed increase by a factor of 100 and 10 respectively.

In the future, we are going to be less concerned about the size of the file and more concerned about how much CPU usage it will require.

I would think it would be better to stick with a less CPU intensive compression format.

 

[danman]

I am not sure if more CPU intensive compression is the way to go.

The speed increases in bandwidth and the size increases in storage are out stripping CPU speed increase by a factor of 100 and 10 respectively.

In the future, we are going to be less concerned about the size of the file and more concerned about how much CPU usage it will require.

I would think it would be better to stick with a less CPU intensive compression format.

You could be right they are moving faster at the moment, but the key thing provded by this standard, flexible codec that performs well at an extremely wide range of bit-rates and qualities is that it can be built in silicon and deployed even in mobile phones. The wide range of applications of the codec brings with it commodity silicon and low low prices...

Besides, playback of H.264 is perfectly possible on your recent-ish mac. Maybe not at HD qualities, but certainly DVD and above qualities.

Where do you get those ratios from anyways?

 

[sinisterdesign]

.. if it can be played on windows then QT should be able to PLAY it.

here, here. i, too have switched to mPlayer b/c it plays 90% of the stuff i throw at it. i am sick of having to drag clips onto the icon all the time, but i've been reluctant to supplant QT as the default. guess i should get over that, huh?

this new codec sounds pretty sweet. i've been keeping up w/ the blue laser format battle that's brewing & was dissapointed to see M$ win out w/ WMV.

for anyone that needs a quick intro to the upcoming format wars, CNN did a pretty good overview: DVD Format War Looms

 

[broken_keyboard]

MPEG4 looks worse than other major codecs at the same bit rate, and the AAC audio files on iTMS often have tape hiss type sounds on them.
Apple has really screwed up in their choice of codecs. Someone has been feeding Steve a line of bull about the relative quality of these codecs.

 

[danman]

MPEG4 looks worse than other major codecs at the same bit rate, and the AAC audio files on iTMS often have tape hiss type sounds on them.
Apple has really screwed up in their choice of codecs. Someone has been feeding Steve a line of bull about the relative quality of these codecs.

Nah, the quality of these codecs is not in question.
Apple's implentation of them is. Apple MPEG4 Video is really bad. Apple MPEG4 Audio is good! - though arguably 128Kb/s is perhaps the lowest bitrate you could concieve of for distributing paid for audio content. 160Kbs would have been perhaps a better choice, but a significant increase in costs for Apple for the iTMS.

 

[jwn315]

Other Use Possibility

If this new codec is going to be used on things like 3G phones, it could, in theory, also work on a new video version of the iPOD, right?

 

[nuckinfutz]

MPEG4 looks worse than other major codecs at the same bit rate, and the AAC audio files on iTMS often have tape hiss type sounds on them.
Apple has really screwed up in their choice of codecs. Someone has been feeding Steve a line of bull about the relative quality of these codecs.

LOL I don't know why I'm even responding to you since I doubt you really have a clue what you're saying. Anywhoo, out of some morbid curiosity, just why do you feel like MPEG4 looks bad and AAC has tape hiss sounds?

And please don't reference that extremetech Codec challenge done by that idiot Jason Cross. That article has been trashed in more ways than one for it's poor methodology.