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Tiger: New QuickTime & H.264 Compression
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Dec 2002
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I'm surprised not many people have mentioned the new QuickTime and H.264 compression which would allow:
QuickTime for Tiger adds advanced compression technology for video creation and playback called H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding), also known as MPEG-4 Part 10. This ultra-efficient, fully scalable video technology produces higher quality video at lower data rates for everything from 3G to HD.
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it's the same rhetoric they had about MPEG-4 before it came out (and Apple's implementation turned out to be poor compared with existing 3rd party implementations). I'm withholding my interest in this until it's released.
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Professional Poster
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Ya this is the same old story, I can't wait to see it but a year is a long time to wait.
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"Laugh it up, fuzz ball!"
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Very much something that should be released now, and not months down the road.
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Originally posted by Chris Grande:
Very much something that should be released now, and not months down the road.
agreed. But they need a feature to sell Tiger with... to all those who do video work, and think dashboard is nasty...
-Owl
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Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
it's the same rhetoric they had about MPEG-4 before it came out (and Apple's implementation turned out to be poor compared with existing 3rd party implementations). I'm withholding my interest in this until it's released.
Yeah, but H.264 is an MPEG-4 compliant codec. And it's actually very good.
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Mac Elite
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Originally posted by Angus_D:
Yeah, but H.264 is an MPEG-4 compliant codec. And it's actually very good.
What they're saying is Apple's implementation of an MPEG4 simple profile codec sucked even while Apple proclaimed it to be the best codec ever. Now Apple is saying the same about their implementation of h.264, but we have no idea how good it is.
BTW, does anyone know if h.264 is included in the 10.4 developer preview?
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From what I've read, H.264 really has not much to do with the traditional MPEG4 codecs except for the name.
H.264 was shown at NAB by Apple, and it indeed is totally awesome. It is the competing format to WMV9, which is excellent too. Imagine HD material at DVD bitrates. It's no surprise that both formats have been adopted for HD-DVD. Now, for HD, with current levels of optimization it's gonna take a dual G5 just to decode H.264 at 8 Mbps hidef. And it will take just about forever for encodes.
OTOH, the requirements are alot less severe for iChat level resolutions, but still, if you have a slower computer, expect iChat not to work that great with multi-user videoconferencing.
I'm wondering if we may see the new iChat before Tiger. QuickTime 7 will include H.264 support. Will QuickTime 7 be out before Tiger?
BTW, H.264 is *already* being used by many companies specifically for videoconferencing, but as a proprietary solution, not as an app with a standard PC AFAIK.
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Eug Wanker: Thanks for the info. I'm REALLY looking forward to QuickTime 7!! 
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Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
From what I've read, H.264 really has not much to do with the traditional MPEG4 codecs except for the name.
H.264 was shown at NAB by Apple, and it indeed is totally awesome. It is the competing format to WMV9, which is excellent too. Imagine HD material at DVD bitrates. It's no surprise that both formats have been adopted for HD-DVD. Now, for HD, with current levels of optimization it's gonna take a dual G5 just to decode H.264 at 8 Mbps hidef. And it will take just about forever for encodes.
OTOH, the requirements are alot less severe for iChat level resolutions, but still, if you have a slower computer, expect iChat not to work that great with multi-user videoconferencing.
I'm wondering if we may see the new iChat before Tiger. QuickTime 7 will include H.264 support. Will QuickTime 7 be out before Tiger?
BTW, H.264 is *already* being used by many companies specifically for videoconferencing, but as a proprietary solution, not as an app with a standard PC AFAIK.
When you say at the same bitrate, it means you can have an HD-DVD at the same size as a DVD of the same material? Or am I misreading that? So basically the format is just highly compressed, taxing the processor more as opposed to visual compression?
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Originally posted by bmedina:
BTW, does anyone know if h.264 is included in the 10.4 developer preview?
I don't know, but I assume it is since they demoed it at WWDC in both iChat and Quicktime.
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Posting Junkie
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Originally posted by Synotic:
When you say at the same bitrate, it means you can have an HD-DVD at the same size as a DVD of the same material? Or am I misreading that? So basically the format is just highly compressed, taxing the processor more as opposed to visual compression?
Yes.
Unfortunately, it takes a dual G5 Power Mac to decode that H.264 HD-DVD, whereas a lowly old G3 laptop can decode a standard DVD just fine.
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Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
Yes.
Unfortunately, it takes a dual G5 Power Mac to decode that H.264 HD-DVD, whereas a lowly old G3 laptop can decode a standard DVD just fine.
What does this say HD-DVD Players? Is this going to significantly raise their prices? Can we tap into our new DVD players with Xgrid now? 
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Posting Junkie
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Originally posted by Synotic:
What does this say HD-DVD Players? Is this going to significantly raise their prices? Can we tap into our new DVD players with Xgrid now?
Well, I'm no expert but...
The chips are coming. Remember, Macs are not built to be DVD players. I think there are probably already (expensive) chips for video playback that support HD on formats like WMV9, and H.264 HD support is coming in chips in the near future (if they aren't already here).
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dedicated chips should be considerably easier and cheaper to make because you can reduce the number of processes necessary to do the decoding drastically. What may take a 'general' processor such as a G5 (for instance) 25 operations to accomplish could be done in a single process by a dedicated decoder. This means that those chips can be much more efficient and not just be a G5-level chip without the rest of the computer.
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Just remember when DVDs came out most general-purpose computers struggled to decode them in real-time.
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(
Last edited by Eug Wanker; Jun 30, 2004 at 12:51 PM.
)
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Originally posted by Eug Wanker:
BTW, H.264 is *already* being used by many companies specifically for videoconferencing, but as a proprietary solution, not as an app with a standard PC AFAIK.
Is that not the far older H263 codec? iVisit and the like has been using it for ages.
O am I barking in completely the wrong forrest here?
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The worst thing about having a failing memory is..... no, it's gone.
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Posting Junkie
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Originally posted by Grrr:
Is that not the far older H263 codec? iVisit and the like has been using it for ages.
O am I barking in completely the wrong forrest here?
H.263 is used, but H.264 is now being used as well. Here's one.
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