New High Quality Video Codec (h.264)

Category: Apple Software
Link: Apple demos high quality video codec
Posted on MacBytes.com

Approved by Mudbug

Quicktime 6.6 soon anyone?

maybe qt 7 at wwdc?

Is there going to be a higher quality DVD comming out I know about the Blue lazer but thought that was for recording HD TV

Sounds like Quicktime upgrade to me.

maybe qt 7 at wwdc?

my prediction is that quicktime 7 will be released to coincide with the release of the trailer for star wars episode iii...

afc

This potentially makes me very happy. h.263 has been my favoured codec for a while now. I've found it much better than Sorenson 3 for video with a lot of motion. QT's MPEG-4 implementation has really sucked up until now. It has pretty lousy scanning artifacts, takes a long time to compress from raw DV, and doesn't really compress files any smaller than h.263. Not to mention that MPEG-4 has no compatibility with QT5 or earlier, although it's doubtful that h.264 will either... Backwards compatibility was definitely a strength of h.263

This should necessitate Apple upgrading QT to 6.6. How else to get the codec distributed to everyone? I doubt they'd leave adding such a major enhancement to each users discretion.

cheers, lk

We are desperately in need of a major QT rewrite.

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

Is there going to be a higher quality DVD comming out I know about the Blue lazer but thought that was for recording HD TV

You're talking about Sony's Blu-Ray discs. They use a Blue laser of course and hold up to 50GB of MPEG2 data on a disck

http://www.blu-ray.com/

The DVD-Forum however has chosed the HW from Toshiba called AOD which uses smaller discs which are 25GB max I believe but they use a more efficient Codec called AVC to cram 4 hrs of HiDefinition video in the same space it takes Blu Ray 50GB. That's how efficient AVC will be and this is the new codec we're talking about. AVC is the official name for h.264.

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)

I think this will lead to QuickTime 6.6/7 and maby, Apple will start shipping PowerMac G5s with the ability to read Blu-Ray disks. Or Apple could ship PowerMacs with the ability to burn DVD9 disks, instead of the lousy DVD5 that only hold 4.7 GB.

What ever happens, this will result in a new QuickTime Pro version, get your credit card ready. :)