Apple develops its own AVC/H.264 Codec!

[bond]

as reported here (http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/04/19/videocodec/)

"In addition to the five product announcements made on Sunday and the upgrades to the notebook product line-up on Monday, Apple Computer Inc. still had a surprise for people visiting their booth at this week's National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas, NV. Apple demonstrated at its booth an advanced HD video codec, dubbed H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10 by the ISO governing body."

great, great, great!!!

"We are working on it, as are many other companies -- here on the floor [at NAB] there are dozens of announcements and demonstrations of H.264. Everywhere except in the Microsoft booth," said Casanova" (Apple's director of QuickTime product marketing)

i had to quote this, sorry ;)

[Selur]

*gig* nice news :)

[Doom9]

let's hope it's better than Apple's pre AVC MPEG-4 codec. Their AAC LC implementation seems to be good, but the same cannot be said about the video part.

[JohnV]

Yep, as several other companies, Apple is still working on it. I took a look at it at NAB2004.
Very high bitrate "HDTV" video was nice. At around 1000kbps I think the currrent development version loses to the best MPEG-4 ASP implementations (they refused to show it to me in fullscreen but I was able to see issues still), but they said they are working on it, and they don't know the exact release date, so nothing can be really said yet about the quality at "dvd encoding" -bitrates.

[CruNcher]

geee ? 1920x1080 @ 1mbit ? hmm it must be heavy inloop filtered if you thought it looked good H264 HDTV transparency is @ 10 mbit

[JohnV]

Eeh, of course I didn't mean HDTV res@1Mbit.. :rolleyes: They were showing some different resolutions and bitrates.
The 1Mbit res was iirc 720. I think I took a pic of that, but dont have it in my hand just now.

[bond]

some other more recent report on this topic here (http://www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3366831)

interesting is maybe the presented media player market share data:
WMP: 38.2 %
Quicktime: 36.8 %
Realplayer: 24.9 %

[Nic]

@doom9: AFAIK There aac was licensed from fraunhofer, so it ought to be about as good as you can get. There video was done in house, at the apple conference last year, they pretty much admitted the video was cr*p ;)

[bond]

wanna have a sample encoded with apples avc codec? here it is:
http://www.purrrr.net/temp/tiger/avc384.mov

the clip uses 384kbps and has been produced with a preview version of quicktime 6.6, which is included in a preview version of apples new mac os x tiger (10.4) from the wwdc 2004

till now the codec is very basic offering only an option for choosing the bitrate
it seems to use b-frames, cavlc only (no cabac), no loopfiltering, multiple reference frames and variable framerate

next to the avc codec it now also has an updated aac codec, which also seems to offer vbr now (and maybe multichannel?)

original discussion (http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?showtopic=22846&) with some pics

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by bond
wanna have a sample encoded with apples avc codec? here it is:
http://www.purrrr.net/temp/tiger/avc384.mov Hi bond,

What exactly do you need to install to make this file play?


Cheers

[bond]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
What exactly do you need to install to make this file play?there is no way to play it :D

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by bond
there is no way to play it :D You just get better and better bond :D

How do you know it works?

EDIT: Still no MP4 container output yet then. I would have thought QuickTime would have done the right thing!


Cheers

[bond]

Originally posted by SeeMoreDigital
How do you know it works?follow the link to the discussion on hydrogenaudio about this

EDIT: Still no MP4 container output yet then. I would have thought QuickTime would have done the right thing!well this codec is far from being ready to use! note that apple announced that it will be released in 2005, i doubt this means the beginning of 2005 so it will still take 1 year or so till the public version is available

i am sure that then there will be support for .mp4 too, but till then they of course first implement it to work with .mov (apples native container)

[lexor]

2005? but thier WebCam (iSight) already uses H.264 for video conferencing, and it's supposed to be quite fast since it's like 3 or 5 people video conference at once. (10 if you want audio only)

[bond]

Originally posted by lexor
2005?
quote from here (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/jun/23quicktime.html):
"QuickTime 6 has already topped 250 million downloads, making it one of the most successful media standards ever, and we will be adding support for H.264 to QuickTime next year."

but thier WebCam (iSight) already uses H.264 for video conferencing, and it's supposed to be quite fast since it's like 3 or 5 people video conference at once. (10 if you want audio only) beaware to not mix up h.263 with h.264

[lexor]

Originally posted by bond
beaware to not mix up h.263 with h.264

I'm not mixing it up:
http://images.apple.com/macosx/tiger/images/h264compare_20040628.jpg

taken from here (http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/h264.html).

[bond]

well this is also taken from the tiger preview...

[SeeMoreDigital]

There's an astonishing difference in the level of detail between the two images!


Cheers

[WaryWolf]

she changed her makeup between the two images to make AVC look better ;)

it's nice to see some commercial implementations of AVC, although quicktime wouldn't be my first choice to use for making dvd backups :)

[SeeMoreDigital]

Originally posted by WaryWolf
it's nice to see some commercial implementations of AVC, although quicktime wouldn't be my first choice to use for making dvd backups :) Sadly, I don't think that will ever be QuickTimes objective.

I don't know about you guys but I think it would be nice to see AVC appear as a movie trailer format... we might get some decent looking video out of the QuickTime player for a change!

Can I ask if anybody here has ever bought (or installed) their Mpeg2 plugin?


Cheers