MPEG releases H.265 draft, promises twice the video quality by 2013 - Page 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by Vorsos 

Originally Posted by mausz 

I would rather see mkv support coming to iOS before this...

mkv is only a container, usually holding mp4 video anyway. Therefore, it seems to be an unnecessary extra enclosure (hello AVCHD).

 

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum 

 

As an aside, I experimented with a similar technique using Apple's "Optical Flow" feature of FCP X.  

• converted a video to frames (image sequence) using QuickTime 7
• dropped some of the frames -- for instance 3 or 4 out of  5
• converted the resulting frames back to a video using QuickTime 7
• used Optical Flow to smooth the video (generate missing frames)

 

This was a pretty gross experiment -- there was no analysis on which frames to drop or any hints about the missing frames... they were gone, just gone!

 

The resulting video was surprisingly good and it used a file that was 10%-30% of the original file size.

Cool research! I think Handbrake (or x264 CLI) does something similar if you crank up the B-frames, though too many breaks hardware playback on some devices.

 

I generally use pretty aggressive Handbrake settings, since a longer one-time encode is worth endless decoding of smaller & nicer files.

I wasn't aware that handbrake could do that, thanks -- damn... now I'll have to rerip & recode all our DVDs... I wonder if it will slim down "The Two Fat Ladies"

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 


You clearly don't need any advice from me but JFYI I am on vacation on a crappy Comcast connection which I rated at <5Mbs. I of course plugged an AE in to the back of the Comcast router for my own WiFi use. Running ML on a MBP i7 I just watched the 5 minute plus video on Apple web site (retina display) without a stutter or dropped frame using Safari.

I'm running Safari 5.1.6 in Lion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum 

I wasn't aware that handbrake could do that, thanks -- damn... now I'll have to rerip & recode all our DVDs... I wonder if it will slim down "The Two Fat Ladies"

Only after one of them sings / wink

I have taken the opposite approach of late, 2 TB bare drives are pretty cheap if you shop around so why kill yourself on the compression end.

I used to save all my DVD rips, because I figured I would recode them as better codecs came available.  I have about 23 TB of various LaCie Drives... but the power bricks die after a few years & I got tired of replacing them (88% failure rate).  Anyway, i kept having fewer and fewer drives available online, so I just wholesale deleted the ripped DVD source to free up online space.

We have about 1,000 videos (mostly ripped DVDs), plus home movies where an 8 GB AVCHD card expands to about 57 Gig...

Finally I said screw it and bought a 12 TB Promise Pegasus RAID... It cost $2,000 -- just $300 more than a 2 TB LaCie I bought 3 years earlier...  It is Thunderbolt & faster than the internal drive on my latest iMac 27.   Anyway great piece of kit -- so much so that I bought another (after the flood) for $2,400.

Two of my 3 grandkids are learning FCP X and watching the 2Reel Guys Podcasts to learn about storytelling...  

Quote:

Originally Posted by d-range 

If Google would have it their way, investments in technological advancements like this would probably not be possible, since everyone was still using an inferior h.264 knockoff codec because it's supposedly 'more open and free' :-/
I can't wait until this becomes mainstream, with hardware codec support. A good Blu-Ray encode is around 8-10 GB right now, and while I'm not particularly bothered by the file size, the quality of such an encode is decidedly worse than a Blu-Ray disc. Same bitrate double the quality please :-)

What knock off codec are you talking about? x264? x264 is an open IMPLMENTATION of AVC/h.264, it's the same format...

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 


Western Digital have been the best drives for me so far. 

Same here. Ever since they came out with Caviar line I've had no problems and they run 24x7 under heavy load in the servers. I think my Mac Pro came with them too. I only opened the case once to put in an Intensity Pro card and I never looked at the drives, however I'm thinking I read somewhere they were WD.

Until the W3C gets some consensus on HTML 5 video, this is all academic.  Having to create a cascade of video options (H.264, WebM, Ogg, Flash) in order to reach an audience is so lame.  Maybe when 90% of that audience is on iOS we can spend less time on encoding and more time creating compelling content.

Quote:

Originally Posted by charlituna 


That's encoding, not decoding, which always takes more resources. And who knows what decoding would take or what Apple has in the pipeline. They could be working on a new Apple TV set box which could handle this that would be out for the holidays. They would likely slowly bring this into the game starting with big name releases or just one or two studios, perhaps as a Super1080 option that would slowly replaced the current 1080 on back titles. Perhaps this would have the power to make digital 3D releases possible and they might start with that. Say with all the Disney/Pixar titles that a being converted. I would pay the current $19.99 digital price if it came with SD, 720, 1080 and 10803D especially if it had several language and subtitle tracks, the disc features etc,

I also posted the line above that about decoding, the 2fps part...

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum 

I used to save all my DVD rips, because I figured I would recode them as better codecs came available.  I have about 23 TB of various LaCie Drives... but the power bricks die after a few years & I got tired of replacing them (88% failure rate).  Anyway, i kept having fewer and fewer drives available online, so I just wholesale deleted the ripped DVD source to free up online space.

We have about 1,000 videos (mostly ripped DVDs), plus home movies where an 8 GB AVCHD card expands to about 57 Gig...

Finally I said screw it and bought a 12 TB Promise Pegasus RAID... It cost $2,000 -- just $300 more than a 2 TB LaCie I bought 3 years earlier...  It is Thunderbolt & faster than the internal drive on my latest iMac 27.   Anyway great piece of kit -- so much so that I bought another (after the flood) for $2,400.

Two of my 3 grandkids are learning FCP X and watching the 2Reel Guys Podcasts to learn about storytelling...  

Awesome that your grandkids are learning to edit video. We just got a new granddaughter last week (hence we are on Cape Cod) and I plan to start teaching her in a few years. / smile

I hear you on failure rates. Seagate has had 100% failure rate for me over time starting with 5MB drives on Apple /// profile and ending with an external 1TB Mac 800 FW drive last month and far too many in between, I say ending as I'll never touch another! Prior to that I used Rodine drives on Apple ][s and they were not much better, don't even ask about Corvus systems! Western Digital have been the best drives for me so far. There has to be a better way ... My first large SSD, a 256 GIG, is showing promise but I know the issues and they are prohibitively expensive. As I have mentioned before, I always have to remember what I paid for 16 GIG RAID systems in 1996 when editing TV shows. OMG! I wonder what we'll have in a decade?

Ha!  We made a lot (a real lot) of money selling Corvus -- they mainly used IMI drives in the early Shaqille shoebox model...  Jeesh, 5 Megabytes for only $4,999.   (Even Apple bought Corvus drives from us).  We had a very good history with Corvus -- it did help that we were their first sale and my wife and I became good friends with the founders.

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 


At least Airplay supports mkv streamed flawlessly from VLC via Apple TV in Mountain Lion or AirParrot on older Macs.

QuickTime would as well, given the proper codecs.

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum 

Ha!  We made a lot (a real lot) of money selling Corvus -- they mainly used IMI drives in the early Shaqille shoebox model...  Jeesh, 5 Megabytes for only $4,999.   (Even Apple bought Corvus drives from us).  We had a very good history with Corvus -- it did help that we were their first sale and my wife and I became good friends with the founders.

To be fair it wasn't the HDs it was the networking software and ribbon cables we had a few issues with (not to mention early multi-user databases) ... we moved to Symbiotic Fiber Optic networks after that on Apple ][s. (we were sales too, not end users).

Oh those were the days! LOL

Now, what possible problems could anyone have with 50 wire (pin) flat ribbon cables?  AIR, they were about 2 inches wide, fairly rigid -- and a joy to string.    I never found any good multi-user databases in those days (before relationals like Oracle, Sybase/Windows DB Server).  Now, even SQLite 3 cad do multi-user.

Someone told me that "Xvid is Open; h264 is proprietary and you have to pay a licence fee to use it." Huh.

Quote:

Originally Posted by davidod315 

Xvid is Open; h264 is proprietary and you have to pay a licence fee to use it.

Xvid sucks compared to H.264 in terms of bitrate:quality, and I don't have to pay a licensing fee to use H.264.  H.264 is free for most consumer use, and even now much pro and content provider use.  The remaining fees that do exists are really negligible and may be greatly offset by the cost difference of having to serve Xvid (not to mention the reduced audience if you use Xvid).

Quote:

Originally Posted by charlituna 


So like he said, the smaller the files.

No, not like he said.  Look at his quot again: "HEVC gives smaller file sizes at higher bitrates".  To correct that phrase you would say, "Any codec gives smaller file sizes at lower bitrates and larger file sizes at higher bitrates".

More important was to correct the comment of "No need to split it when you get both!".  Yes, you do need to "split" meaning a decision with any codec still needs to be made in terms of trading off quality for bitrate.  One could, if they wanted, use HEVC and get lower quality than H.264.  One could also use HEVC and get higher bitrates (larger file sizes) than H.264.  However, using HEVC gives you a better quality:bitrate ratio than H.264 does... it's about twice that of H.264.  So one must still decide on how much they want the quality and/or the bitrate to improve using HEVC versus H.264. 

Minor point, but the following statements are misleading:

Google subsequently acquired Motorola Mobility, gaining ownership of several patents essential to H.264. It has used these patents to seek import injunctions and demand billions in licensing royalties from Microsoft and Apple as leverage against patent infringement claims targeting Android.

I don't believe that the Motorola H.264 patents are what they are trying to use to seek import injunctions and royalty payments from Apple over, the patents in question are related to 3G and other cellular wireless communications.

Maybe the author just threw this in to include a link to another AppleInsider article?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dick Applebaum 

 

I used to save all my DVD rips, because I figured I would recode them as better codecs came available.  I have about 23 TB of various LaCie Drives... but the power bricks die after a few years & I got tired of replacing them (88% failure rate).  Anyway, i kept having fewer and fewer drives available online, so I just wholesale deleted the ripped DVD source to free up online space.

 

I've had the same issue with Lacie drives. Out of 7, all but one had issues. The worst were the Porsche designed models. I'll not buy any more Lacie drives.

FYI, if you rip DVDs, you should check out iVI Pro from South Pole Software. It's a great timesaver, especially if you're ripping DVDs of TV episodes. If you use RipIt to save a copy of the DVD to your hard drive, you could queue up a week's worth of ripping and leave it unattended.

This process saved us untold aggravation of our children not finding the DVD they wanted to watch. Legal Note: DVD's ripped were of copies were personally own and have in our possession. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by nagromme 

Split the difference please! Videos encoded a bit smaller yet also a bit higher-quality would be great. My awful AT&T DSL is just SLIGHTLY too slow for much of the video on the web these days.

Uh... yeah, you can do that too.

Now he's all like "youtube is switiching to open VP8 format. WC3 doesn't want HTML5 to support a closed implementation of MP4 video either" double wut

Quote:

Originally Posted by digitalclips 


Indeed as we get these staggeringly high download speeds it all to often reveals the limitations of the other end. On the other hand I started watching the NBC Live Olympics on 75 Mbs download at home and went on vacation to a place with 5 Mbs and there was zero difference in the HD quality which truly shocked me.

That's because "HD" on Cable is either a MPEG-2 TS with H262 video or a MPEG-2 TS with a h263 or h264 video stream. Seriously, I can check what my cable box spews out right now...

I've had the DSL version before as well, but they do it with Mpeg2 TS with h264. Running two SD streams takes 5Mbits. I can't claim anything about the HD as I don't live there anymore. 

The trick in video compression is that it scales linearly.

MPEG1 ran on a 386 with a 1X CD-ROM

MPEG2 ran on a Pentium with a DVD-ROM

Then we had this lull where Divx/xvid jacked h263 and it became the pirate codec of choice until they ran into file size limits. Mobile phones still were in dumbphone phase until at least 2005 when camera phones started being all the rage and MMS messages (remember those?) started happening. However it was sites like Youtube that actually started utilizing the codec with the flash plugin. Prior to youtube, all video sites were terrible.

However h264 and the x264 codec is what runs sites like Youtube, It's also the native video format used by all consumer cell phones, camcorders, pictures cameras, webcams, animation software, etc. So this is what we're stuck with until h265. Perhaps maybe something reasonable can be decided with h265 that all hardware and software can encode, and decode freely, and limit licencing to hardware (not software.) Software, it's inevitable that an x264-like project will come along, perhaps written natively against openCL so that an encoder and decoder can work on the underlying GPU hardware. The reason there are "hardware accelerated" GPU's for mpeg codec's is largely because GPU's used to be fixed function. This hasn't been that way for quite a while, so it's certainly possible to accelerate a h265 video on current video hardware. Encoding however will still require more powerful hardware. 

As it is, current h26x video encoding doesn't make efficient use of multiple cores in a CPU, or multiple GPU's because the compression process is still linear. What needs to happen is developing a codec that scales with available bandwidth and processors. If a system is incapable of decoding a 2560x1400 video, it should downgrade it to 1080p, 720p, 480p, etc so that it still plays smoothly. Currently video players just drop frames which leads to ghosting or motion-blur effects. Devices with smaller screens wouldn't need to scale up, just scale down.

Quote:

Originally Posted by WelshDog 

YAY! Another codec we have to deal with in post production.  The size reduction is welcome, the extreme processing overhead is not.  

 

Since is only draft at this point won't it be quite some time before we see this in use?  Certainly hardware acceleration is way far off.

This isn't even a delivery codec, it's a distribution codec.  In most serious post scenarios, you shouldn't be dealing with h.264 footage.

Good article, thanks. I am always interested in advances in video codecs. Hopefully they will use this to increase quality on iTunes rather than just lower filesizes.