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?
h264 is proprietary and you have to pay a licence fee to use it." Huh.
Those that want to put h264 support in their software have to pay the standards group a license to include it. However the fees are dirt cheap and for a time were free, heck might still be.
Consumers don't have to pay anything above the cost of said software.m
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.
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.
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...
Video: MPEG2 Video 1920x1080 29.97fps 24000kbps [Video - MPEG2, Main Profile, High Level, 1920x1080, 29.970 fps, 24.00 mbit/s (0800,e0,00)]
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.
How does it see both libraries when only one user is logged in?
Nope, but I shouldn't have to waste $600 on a computer I will never use for any reason just to do something my hardware is already capable of doing.
The iTunes Library will stay open if you switch to another user profile without logging off. If you have a separate library it will open as well, and so on... You could have more than one library open with no problem at all. If you are not sure about this, try it out. You will find it works fine.
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.
Haha
Well carpet nails hammered through the cable was one problem I recall. On the databases no one explained record locking to us back then ... I seem to recall we set it up multi-user without understanding what the hell we were doing. It worked most of the time! I am trying to remember the Apple ][ database we used, DB was in the name. This was 1979 or around then I think.
Re Corvus, I have a distant memory of speaking with the owner of Corvus who swapped out a faulty system for us. I was based in the north of England at the time. Phone calls to CA back then were not easy and very expensive. Apple were not even the actual distributor in the UK at the time, we had to go through an intermediary called Microsense if memory serves me, a company owned by two brothers Mike Brewer and I forget the other in Hemel Heamstead, just north of London.
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.
You are a mine of information. Is your profession related to this subject?
H.264 alone has arrived in amazing, amazing leaps and bounds, along with x264 and others. Even Steve never imagined that our 2010 bandwidth could handle this sort of video, but the advances in compression technology have been really killer.
H.264 still struggles mainly with dark and fast-moving scenes. If they know what they're doing, H.265 will sort this out, at least for 1080p to make approx. 5mbit/sec 1080.24p just... spectacularrr.
Of course, nothing as great as BluRay, but in a few years H.265 will surpass BluRay, I hope, and prep the world for 2K video for the unwashed masses.
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.
H.264 alone has arrived in amazing, amazing leaps and bounds, along with x264 and others. Even Steve never imagined that our 2010 bandwidth could handle this sort of video, but the advances in compression technology have been really killer.
H.264 still struggles mainly with dark and fast-moving scenes. If they know what they're doing, H.265 will sort this out, at least for 1080p to make approx. 5mbit/sec 1080.24p just... spectacularrr.
Of course, nothing as great as BluRay, but in a few years H.265 will surpass BluRay, I hope, and prep the world for 2K video for the unwashed masses.
The iTunes Library will stay open if you switch to another user profile without logging off. If you have a separate library it will open as well, and so on... You could have more than one library open with no problem at all. If you are not sure about this, try it out. You will find it works fine.
I didn't know that. However with iCloud and iTunes Match this would seem redundant for music at least. However, I'm not sure how this addresses the original point we made about how cool it would be if there were an iTunes system for an Apple Network that didn't require a dedicated Mac to be running for movies. We were discussing having a hard drive attached to the network, on the AE for example but to date that requires iTunes running on a Mac using that drive as the source of a library.
<span style="color:rgb(24,24,24);font-family:'lucida grande', verdana, helvetica, sans-serif;line-height:normal;background-color:rgb(226,225,225);">We have two libraries on our Mac and the ATV finds them just fine. One for each user. The mac wakes on LAN so no problem there either. iTunes is in the login items for both users. I'm not understanding why this is a huge problem? If you're a laptop only guy and worried about battery life by enabling wake on LAN, get a crappy old Mac Mini and stick in in a dark corner with your HDs. </span>
I have 3 ATV 3s, and am running mountain lion on my 2010 iMac. I could wake up from LAN before I upgraded to ML (only change)- just curious- what OS are you running.
Cheers... After getting 10-15mbit/sec aka "proper basic ADSL2" watching 1080p content online has blown me away. Mind you I stepped up from nasty torrented DVD rips... which I refuse to do nowadays as I believe all content should be purchased legitimately.
Of course, iOS and AppleTV specifically is best for 1080p streamed/downloaded content.
I noticed that too. My video starts then about 5 seconds in, there is one big stutter where the screen momentarily goes black. Happens on apple.com videos, Netflix, and YouTube.
Haven't checked my iMac since upgrading to ML, but my new iPad stutters as described quite often.
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.
I didn't know that. However with iCloud and iTunes Match this would seem redundant for music at least. However, I'm not sure how this addresses the original point we made about how cool it would be if there were an iTunes system for an Apple Network that didn't require a dedicated Mac to be running for movies. We were discussing having a hard drive attached to the network, on the AE for example but to date that requires iTunes running on a Mac using that drive as the source of a library.
It was in response to the specific assertion made that one computer could not have ore than one iTunes library open at a time. You can, I have done it, and I told how. Do what you will with the information. In response to your question or topic about a system for delivery of iTunes. It would be cool. Whether or not it will ever be made is another question.
Comments
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?
Those that want to put h264 support in their software have to pay the standards group a license to include it. However the fees are dirt cheap and for a time were free, heck might still be.
Consumers don't have to pay anything above the cost of said software.m
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...
Video: MPEG2 Video 1920x1080 29.97fps 24000kbps [Video - MPEG2, Main Profile, High Level, 1920x1080, 29.970 fps, 24.00 mbit/s (0800,e0,00)]
Audio: Dolby AC3 48000Hz 6ch 384kbps [Audio - English, Dolby Digital, 48.0 kHz, 6 chn, 384.0 kbit/s (0801,bd,00)]
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.
The iTunes Library will stay open if you switch to another user profile without logging off. If you have a separate library it will open as well, and so on... You could have more than one library open with no problem at all. If you are not sure about this, try it out. You will find it works fine.
Haha
Well carpet nails hammered through the cable was one problem I recall. On the databases no one explained record locking to us back then ... I seem to recall we set it up multi-user without understanding what the hell we were doing. It worked most of the time! I am trying to remember the Apple ][ database we used, DB was in the name. This was 1979 or around then I think.
Re Corvus, I have a distant memory of speaking with the owner of Corvus who swapped out a faulty system for us. I was based in the north of England at the time. Phone calls to CA back then were not easy and very expensive. Apple were not even the actual distributor in the UK at the time, we had to go through an intermediary called Microsense if memory serves me, a company owned by two brothers Mike Brewer and I forget the other in Hemel Heamstead, just north of London.
You are a mine of information. Is your profession related to this subject?
H.264 still struggles mainly with dark and fast-moving scenes. If they know what they're doing, H.265 will sort this out, at least for 1080p to make approx. 5mbit/sec 1080.24p just... spectacularrr.
Of course, nothing as great as BluRay, but in a few years H.265 will surpass BluRay, I hope, and prep the world for 2K video for the unwashed masses.
Sweet... Old skool bro.
Amen brother (and I'm an atheist!).
I didn't know that. However with iCloud and iTunes Match this would seem redundant for music at least. However, I'm not sure how this addresses the original point we made about how cool it would be if there were an iTunes system for an Apple Network that didn't require a dedicated Mac to be running for movies. We were discussing having a hard drive attached to the network, on the AE for example but to date that requires iTunes running on a Mac using that drive as the source of a library.
I have 3 ATV 3s, and am running mountain lion on my 2010 iMac. I could wake up from LAN before I upgraded to ML (only change)- just curious- what OS are you running.
Cheers... After getting 10-15mbit/sec aka "proper basic ADSL2" watching 1080p content online has blown me away. Mind you I stepped up from nasty torrented DVD rips... which I refuse to do nowadays as I believe all content should be purchased legitimately.
Of course, iOS and AppleTV specifically is best for 1080p streamed/downloaded content.
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.
Haven't checked my iMac since upgrading to ML, but my new iPad stutters as described quite often.
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.