New Codec support. Apple hops on AVC train

hmurchisonhmurchison
Posted:
in Mac Software edited January 2014
Apple demos h.264 at NAB 2004



Quote:

With its ability to encode content for so many mediums, Casanova sees uses for h.264 in many of the everyday things we do today, including DVD movies, Cable television providers, on-demand television in hotels and next-generation cellular telephones. For example, with h.264, DVD content authoring houses could use the same size DVD disk, but output the content in HD quality.



Finally. Great news. Apple is now showing support for a codec that is one of the mandatory codecs proposed by the DVD Forum. Advanced Video Coding does come with some hefty Encode/Decode requirements. Today it's roughly 8x Encode 4x Decode over standard MPEG2. Meaning lowcost portable video players are a bit off for now until new powerful chips come out with support.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    zozo Posts: 3,117member
    this is AWESOME information...



    I'm in satellite busienss and I'm gonna show this off to my boss since we're looking at H.264 as an alternative to possibly using WM9 as a broadcast codec (which we are already using)....
  • Reply 2 of 3
    adpowersadpowers Posts: 188member
    I was reading about this a while back. I didn't realize there were any implementations available yet (well, besides the reference one). The comparison to MPEG-4 is amazing. However, the review I saw (using the unoptimized reference encoder/decoder) said it took 2 hours to encode an 8 second clip and there were not yet any players that could play it back in real time. Actually, looking around now, it appears they have some implementations out http://www.videosoftinc.com/. Oh, and here is the review: http://www.balooga.com/mpeg4.php3.



    I would love to see this in iChat; the future of streaming video is looking even better .
  • Reply 3 of 3
    hmurchisonhmurchison Posts: 12,423member
    Yes evidently AVC should be fairly scalable from a low bitrate to a bitrate high enough for HD video. I think Apple will be chomping at the bit to get this working and working right seeing as how WM9 right now is generating more interest than Apple would like to see.



    It is going to be a while before we see PVR's using AVC though. It's far easier to have a PVC record MPEG2 high bitrate right now than something like AVC. Shame cause an 80GB harddrive recording HD AVC would provide over 12 hrs of HD recording.
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