rendezvouscp said:
You know that "I concur" in Spanish is "concurro" right?
BTW, to those of you who think h.264 is crap: it's not! It's an outstanding codec and I'm very glad they used h.264 for the videos. I think Apple did a pretty good job balancing quality and size and h.264 fit the bill really well.
-Chase
I agree that h.264 is awesome, but I think you're confused about what exactly makes h.264 great.
H.264 is a compression technology, much like DivX. Straight DV video (a decent example, since its common for consumers) takes up about 12gb per hour of video. This can be lessened with minimal quality loss to a high quality MPEG-2, as used in a DVD.
Now, this is fine and dandy. A 2 hour movie might take up the better part of a 9.4 gb dual layer DVD, and the quality is pretty good.
Now, if people wanted, they could lower the quality, and therefore lower the size of the file. Even with the filesize cut in half, a DVD would probably still look good. But not that good.
Enter high-efficiancy compression, notably DivX and XviD. They allow you to get that ~7gb movie down to 700-1300mb, with little or no perceivable quality loss. This is done through more efficient compression. The loss with more efficient compression is that a faster, more powerful computer is needed to decode them.
When DivX was first becoming popular, you needed a fairly high end machine to decode it. Now, just about any computer sold can.
Now we have H.264 starting to become popular. Its more efficient, but also requires a more powerful machine. Thats why even my Rev. D 12" Powerbook chokes on 720p H.264, where it might be able to handle the same quality in DivX. Since H.264 produces a smaller, more efficient file, it is harder to decode.
I hope that made sense... Its late, and I'm sleep deprived. The point is that Apple did more than find a magic number which balanced size versus quality; they used a new codec to make a smaller file with the same (or better) quality.
