H.264: Why is it so much better than normal DivX5/MPEG4?

[Ewi]

You read here, you read there about H.264, but not in the Doom9 forums. Why?

As far as I know it's so good and gives remarkable better compression, that it will be joined as a MPEG4 extension("MPEG-4 Part 10").

Invented by JVT, a joint project (ITU-T and ISO/IEC;so VERY official!), it's a direct competitor to WMV9 in relation to "Better-than-MPEG4-SP" compression, cause it joins the features and capabilities of MPEG4 and H.26L.

But I don't know any technical details. Is somebody out there who knows more? When will we see first software implementations? Are there statements by the Xvid team regarding this?

Actually I only have a german link:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/vza-13.09.02-001/

P.S.: I don't know if this is the right place to discuss such a thing, but I don't know where to post this. Excuse me...

[Acaila]

P.S.: I don't know if this is the right place to discuss such a thing, but I don't know where to post this. Excuse me...As this is not about a single codec it is best placed in the General section I believe.

As for H.264, I actually hadn't heard about it before but thanks for pointing me to it :)

[killingspree]

sounds really nice...
but i think it's still in the early stages... but we will see!
it obviously scares hollywood! :-P

steVe

[-h]

H.264 == H.26L == MPEG-4 part 10 == AVC == JVT.

It just depends on who you ask.

-h

[Nic]

"==" <- LoL spot the C programmer

-Nic

[MfA]

ISO/MPEG's contribution is rather minimal, just like MPEG-4 (at least the usefull part) it is basically mostly ITU's baby. It is rather unfortunate MPEG got into the game so early, it would have been nicer for us if there had been a complete ITU standard before they got involved. Already now some parts of the meeting notes are confidential and closed to the public (did not happen before they got involved). The reference software is still open and under the same laissez faire licensing scheme it has been under before, apart from patent issues completely GPL compatible unlike the MPEG license, but I only hope that continues to be the case till the final standard.

If you want general information on it just search for h26l or h.26l (which are the best established names for it). If you want technical information just look at the official ftp server at ftp://ftp.imtc-files.org/jvt-experts/

[SirDavidGuy]

ISO/MPEG's contribution is rather minimal, just like MPEG-4 (at least the usefull part) it is basically mostly ITU's baby

I disagree.

The parts that will help in the future were mostly contributed by MPEG;
The problem is that all current MP4 encoders are basically "Mpeg-2 ++), not using any of the huge space-saving features in the standard.

The inclusion of H.26L will help in a full version of the specs, but not by a huge amount (IMHO).

[MfA]

Potentially space saving features you mean ... I dont know of any object based codec which could beat H.26L in its present state for the kind of video we are interested in. Do you?

[Tommy Carrot]

I do not believe object based coding is useful for general purposes, only for videoconferencing. I cannot imagine, how would it be successful with dinamic (not just moving, but changing) background, and dinamic foreground, not counting the shadows, etc. If you could segmentate them somehow, still could not save too much with it.

BTW, with proper settings, the reference h.26l is pretty impressive qualitywise, believe me.;)

[SirDavidGuy]

That's whats required; a dynamic evaluator of shapes and objects.

Not easy, but feasible. But once it's actually created, it will work wonderfully.

This also has huge helping abilities in applications where the objects are stored seporately, and put together later (like video games).

[trbarry]

I worry somewhat that as something is engulfed in an ISO/MPEG standard it will be the subject of a huge R&D effort, done mostly by lawyers.

- Tom

[CruNcher]

JVT (Joint Video Team) = ITU-T/ISO/IEC Group of Video Coding Experts from Universities and the Industry among them for example Companies like Nokia, Philips, Ericsson, UBVideo, Sandvideo, Videolocus, Real Networks, German Telekom (T-Systems), Motorola, Telenor, Intel, Microsoft and many more.

H.26L ist the old name of the standard it's now called H.264/MPEG-4 AVC (Advanced Video Coding).

Links:
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http://bs.hhi.de/~wiegand/JVT.html |Cabac|Rdo|Mmp
http://bs.hhi.de/~suehring/tml/ |Reference Software| inc Unoffical
http://www.videolocus.com/Technology/technology.htm |First Realtime H.264 Encoder