H.264 Vs. WMV

[fegul]

Some people I know were downloading apples high def h.264 trailers, and were complaining about it lagging.

They then tried the WMV Hidef trailers on MS's site, and it ran fine. They were wondering about what is so great about h.264 vs WMV 9?

I'm still somewhat new to the h.264 scene, so I thought I'd present the question to those with more experience.

Thanks!

[berrinam]

H.264 is great because of the compression and/or quality it allows for. However, in the world of downloading HD trailers, the comparison you made between them is not fair, for several reasons:

1. Who says lagging has anything to do with how good a codec is? It could lag because you have a slow computer, or you are streaming it and you don't have the required bandwidth, or you are using a slow player (QuickTime, for instance).
2. Most people who download trailers don't have much perception of the quality of compressed videos, and will claim that both videos look fine, especially because of 3.
3. For many of the HD trailers, the codecs have huge amounts of bitrate to use, and so the quality is generally so high that it is (a) hard to see the difference, and (b) a waste of such efficient codecs.

Furthermore, we have no indication of the bitrates, and there is no reason to assume they are at all similar, so there is really no plausible comparison that can be drawn by this other than _perhaps_ that MS's media player runs faster than Apple's.

Keep in mind that Apple is NOT H.264, and the videos produced by Apple should not be taken as an examplar of the H.264 standard as the quality is subpar.

[Sagittaire]

WMV-HD use ~ 6 Mbps for 720p trailers. It's a very high quality. MPEG2 Unconstrained can encode with very high quality too with this bitrate. In fact if you want see real difference you must use ~ 2.0 Mbps or less

[bond]

1) wmv9 cant beat even xvid clearly on 1cd backup bitrates, so it has no chance against a good h.264 implementation, like x264 or ateme
2) the "some people" you are talking about propably tried to play h.264 in quicktime7? this is a totally buggy and crappy player. tell them to use something better to enjoy nice h.264 playback
3) btw "wmv" is a container, not a codec. what you are talking about is wmv9, m$' implementation of the vc-1 video standard

[Sirber]

3) btw "wmv" is a container, not a codec. what you are talking about is wmv9, m$' implementation of the vc-1 video standardIsn't only M$ that implemented VC-1?

[bond]

Isn't only M$ that implemented VC-1?vc-1 is an open standard, that is near finalisation. everyone can implement a vc-1 codec

edit: there is a not yet working vc-1 decoder in the ffmpeg project for example

[fegul]

Most of them have quicktime alternative and tried to play it with either WMP or MPC.

The ones that were complaining the most had pretty decent systems (AMD 3700+).

Yes, in the title I misused the term wmv for a codec, but corrected myself later on in the post. So Apple does not use h.264? Are there any places that feature downloadable clips that use true h.264?

[Sharktooth]

Quicktime is slow, buggy and crippled (both encoder and decoder) and should NEVER be used to play back h.264 streams.
Apple QuickTime uses a subset of the h.264 features so the efficiency of what they call h.264 is suboptimal and not comparable to the TRUE h.264 eficiency.
Avoid QuickTime at all costs! And also keep in mind the trailers on their site are limited in quality and compression in respect to other h.264 implementations (like x264 for example).

[fegul]

That makes sense. Is Apple's implementation hardware accelerated at all for Macs? Why would it seem to run faster on slower Macs as compared to nice PCs?

[Sirber]

a nice or old PC with CoreAVC kick ass

[Sharktooth]

That makes sense. Is Apple's implementation hardware accelerated at all for Macs? Why would it seem to run faster on slower Macs as compared to nice PCs?
QuickTime is born on the Macs and on a different architecture. The Windows port is even more slow, buggy and crappy than the original QuickTime for Mac...

[videomixer9]

Disable use of Quicktime for Quicktime Movies in MPC, install CoreAVC and see how Apples 1080 trailers only use 30% CPU or even less ... I just checked out how much CPU that X-Men 3 trailer used in 1080p and I was amazed seeing MPC only use 30-50% on my Athlon XP 3000+. Guess Apple proves yet again that all they can do is designing and making ppl buy better PCs or make them buy extra expensive Macs with their lousy programming skills.

As to WMV9, of course we know the bitrate as the player even displays the average rate used. Besides there are complete movies from MS, mostly IMAX ones that fit on 2.5 GB with a length of 45 mins in 1080p resolution, I got the Amazon and Coral Reef Adventure Movies as full versions and I have to say that they are awesome quality for the ~7mbps average bitrate WMP shows as bitrate, besides they play fine with the MS decoder, though it uses all of my CPU to decode. TV stations in germany said they'd use 9mbit datarate for HDTV airing with H264, and imo both H264 or WMV9 are able to deliver stunning quality even with 6-7mbit bitrate, whatever you may think of MS but WMVHD is imo a good product, and MS prooved this with the sold DVDs of those movies. I bet that full implementations of H264 can beat WMV9, however if your goal is getting a HDTV 1080p movie on a single DVD, you'll get stunning quality with both. If your goal is single cd backups, you're better off with H264 in any case as MS codec doesn't perform that well in that case, and x264 plugin for video over shoutcast also shows that h264 is better in streaming quality, recently found test streams send over shoutcast using h264 that look awesome at low bitrate, however usually shoutcast video is VP62, but it's easy to compare to similar bitrated other streams ...

[sillKotscha]

recently found test streams send over shoutcast using h264 ...

link(s) for my winamp bookmarks please :D

[videomixer9]

http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=230015 had some links and the needed plugin, major buggy though

[AlexeyS]

I've tried to encode to WMV many times. I've compared AVC and WMV clips. WMV is toooo blurry. You will loose high resolution (DivX HD makes this too). ;)

[slavickas]

QuickTime is born on the Macs and on a different architecture. The Windows port is even more slow, buggy and crappy than the original QuickTime for Mac...
interesting how this will change with macinteltosh release