When should we move to MPEG4 AVC?

[Andrey]

>>Too bad there's no AAC or AAC+ in either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
Hmm ?
AAC+ was officially anounced as "must be supported" by HDDVD.
Is something changed ?
Am I missed something ? :)

[bond]

Originally posted by TheResonator
This is one of the features of HD-DVD: HD-rate AVC on red-laser discs.
The subset of the file structure and navigation information needed to do this in HD-DVD is almost identical to DVD.
These discs will play on future HD-DVD players.where do you know this from? any links?

[TheResonator]

I talked with HD-DVD and Nero people at their CES exhibits this year.

HE-AAC was added to the ROM section of DVD Audio. The list of audio coedcs for the HD-DVD Video part are here:

http://www.dvdforum.org/27scmtg-resolution.htm

..it's possible that Blu-Ray and/or DVD Forum could add HE-AAC before the final this-time-for-sure closure of the spec.

[IgorC]

Will H.264 be potentially improved in future? There is no garanty to obtain better quality folowing partiton DCT 4x2 2x4 2x2 since number of motion vectors will increse and this will require more space to store information.

In last comparing test Doom9 it´s hard to spote difference between AVC main and high profiles. Will Custom matrix, 8x8 DCT etc. resolve this situation? Maybe it only resolves the problem of jumping blocks wich sometimes appear on video.

[TheResonator]

The 8x8 transform shape helps both a low bitrates (less overhead) and high rates with film grain. The 4x4 transform shape has a critical quantization effect with film grain. 8x8 was therefore a fix to the standard -- should have been included in the original Main Profile. Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, DVB, and other standards now require this fix.

As far as picking different shapes, a good encoder will estimate the costs of coding all mode permutations and pick the one that gives the best quality for the lowest rate. Sending 4x4 motion vectors is often cheaper than packing lots of transform coefficients.

[Yong]

Now i already have more info's about baseline and main profile, but the info still not detail.
Where can i find the info's about h264 profile?
Especially extended, high profile.

[Manao]

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=73022 ( that's the sticky thread on this forum... )

Extended profile doesn't concern dvd ripp ( it adds data partitionning and SI / SP slices, which concern either diffusion or multiprogram ).

[Yong]

@Manao:
Oh, i'm forget the sticky:p
thanks:D

[Sharktooth]

Mpeg4 ASP HD (like DivX HD etc.).
AVC is still too complex to be played back. But eventually you can upgrade the CPU with a more powerfull one.

[aeternitas]

I'm personally not too worried about this. If youre doing this for backup, well in the next couple of codec generations lossy compression will be replaced by lossless. From the digitally recorded 60FPS+ progressive movie source to the 500GB+ mini-disc size multilayered future optical disk.

Lossy compression will have its last breaths of life in online content. Fansubs etc, where size of each episode is dictated directly by the mainstream optical single layer storage medium and average online download speed from bittorent. Right now 175MB for 24 min~ was a dication due to CD storage. Youll start to see that go down to 149 due to AVC and DVD single layer and faster download speeds.

[TheResonator]

Nearly all new PC graphics cards will accelerate AVC by 2007.
720p/1080i AVC playback won't be a problem.

It's possible now to playback 720p 30fps content on a single 3 GHz Pentium CPU with no hardware video decompression acceleration:

http://www.fastvdo.com/fastvdoinit.html

For lossy: don't be silly :-) There is no such thing as "enough storage". It's an endless cycle. (I still spend most of my video time with half-D1). UHDTV comes after HDTV. The 4K era is already starting with Digital Cinema. 24p 1920x1080 needs at least 400 GB/hour. ~$10 per terabyte-class removable storage is several years away. Movies on solid state is the "in thing" too.

[aeternitas]

Originally posted by TheResonator
Nearly all new PC graphics cards will accelerate AVC by 2007.
720p/1080i AVC playback won't be a problem.

It's possible now to playback 720p 30fps content on a single 3 GHz Pentium CPU with no hardware video decompression acceleration:

http://www.fastvdo.com/fastvdoinit.html

For lossy: don't be silly :-) There is no such thing as "enough storage". It's an endless cycle. (I still spend most of my video time with half-D1). UHDTV comes after HDTV. The 4K era is already starting with Digital Cinema. 24p 1920x1080 needs at least 400 GB/hour. ~$10 per terabyte-class removable storage is several years away. Movies on solid state is the "in thing" too.

Is that 400GB/h with current lossless compression? Actually with todays lossless compressions that is less than 300GB/h. 1920x1080 losslessly compressed will be less than 2MB typically, and in my tests was 1.66MB average. Lossless compression five and ten years from now will have a better results.

Also understand that next generation optical media will be multi layered with each layer being many tens of GB. A 3 hour losslessly compressed movie can surely fit on two generations from now in optical storage and compression technology. Lossy compression was never meant to always be here.

1920x1080 is a bit over 2MP

[TheResonator]

Wasn't thinking about lossless or near-lossless -- just raw 4:2:2 video I get from an HD D-5 dumped to disk. There are too many variables such as 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 8-bit and 10-bit. It's in the hundreds of billions of bytes per hour. Film grain and noise mess it up. Don't tell certain unmentionable digital cinema buffs that film grain should be removed --- it's part of the artistic experience! :-)

I'm not sure content holders would ever release lossless HD content anyway.

We've been living with companding, subsampling, coring, bandlimiting, sub-nyquisting, .. basically some form of lossy compression since the beginning.

Many-layered discs, like holographic laser crystal storage, have been promised for years. They work to some degree, but have had cost and lifetime issues. Maybe 3D storage will finally become practical as hinted by Sony around the year 2015.

The point of all this is: now (well, around July 2005) is a good time to switch to AVC. It's just the next ubiquitous codec after MPEG-2. ASP might become a footnote in history as far as the average consumer is concerned. Industy can only absorb new codecs every 10 years or so. And the patent police have made it practically impossible to build products that don't use standard codecs. At least there's some consolation in that AVC and HE-AAC are the best in their class, though somewhat forced down our throats.

[aeternitas]

Originally posted by TheResonator
Wasn't thinking about lossless or near-lossless -- just raw 4:2:2 video I get from an HD D-5 dumped to disk. There are too many variables such as 4:2:0, 4:2:2, 8-bit and 10-bit. It's in the hundreds of billions of bytes per hour. Film grain and noise mess it up. Don't tell certain unmentionable digital cinema buffs that film grain should be removed --- it's part of the artistic experience! :-)

I'm not sure content holders would ever release lossless HD content anyway.

We've been living with companding, subsampling, coring, bandlimiting, sub-nyquisting, .. basically some form of lossy compression since the beginning.

Many-layered discs, like holographic laser crystal storage, have been promised for years. They work to some degree, but have had cost and lifetime issues. Maybe 3D storage will finally become practical as hinted by Sony around the year 2015.

The point of all this is: now (well, around July 2005) is a good time to switch to AVC. It's just the next ubiquitous codec after MPEG-2. ASP might become a footnote in history as far as the average consumer is concerned. Industy can only absorb new codecs every 10 years or so. And the patent police have made it practically impossible to build products that don't use standard codecs. At least there's some consolation in that AVC and HE-AAC are the best in their class, though somewhat forced down our throats.

Compression will always be around so Im not even thinking about uncompressed data. Its impratical. Im simply stateing that the practicality of lossy media slowly declines everytime the internet gets faster and optical storage becomes more able to hold massive amounts of bits.

Im not reffering to holo crystal. This next generation of optical storage (the better version of the two) can hold 25GB per layer upto 200GB. This is a very good indication of the future of compression and what types youll be useing in several years. H.26X will be mainly used in cell phones and other internet connected media devices that share a home connection where bandwidth is limited and retaining the full detail of the original media is negligable. lossy will have its place, and those who realize where it is tomarrow, can compress today with a clearer mind, no matter what they choose.

[DaveId]

even when it is totally possible for people to have terrabytes of storage in their homes, how long do you think it will be before it is mainstream? how many people here are close to a terrabyte in their system? and if you are, how full of compressed data is it? i know i have 600GB and like 550GB used! no space for lossless video, more concerned with lossless audio as my ears are better than my eyes at percieving compression..
dave

[aeternitas]

Originally posted by DaveId
even when it is totally possible for people to have terrabytes of storage in their homes, how long do you think it will be before it is mainstream? how many people here are close to a terrabyte in their system? and if you are, how full of compressed data is it? i know i have 600GB and like 550GB used! no space for lossless video, more concerned with lossless audio as my ears are better than my eyes at percieving compression..
dave

I'll try and make a simple summery of what I already said for you.

1. Lossless compression becomes more relevent ever new evolution in optical storage.
2. Who said anything about hard drives? Optical storage. In case you forgot.. we are talking about optical storage.

Optical storage.

You make my point for me with your mention of lossless audio. Lossless audio will be here 5 - 10 years before lossless video takes the vast majority of optical storage space when talking about media.

One is already seeing this in digital photography. Photographers that care about their images do not use jpeg. Its laughable on anything but online, and so will be every other media type in the future. and once again, I remind you that that point is driven home a step more by every advance in optical storage.

[DaveId]

Originally posted by aeternitas
I'll try and make a simple summery of what I already said for you.

1. Lossless compression becomes more relevent ever new evolution in optical storage.
2. Who said anything about hard drives? Optical storage. In case you forgot.. we are talking about optical storage.

Optical storage.

You make my point for me with your mention of lossless audio. Lossless audio will be here 5 - 10 years before lossless video takes the vast majority of optical storage space when talking about media.

One is already seeing this in digital photography. Photographers that care about their images do not use jpeg. Its laughable on anything but online, and so will be every other media type in the future. and once again, I remind you that that point is driven home a step more by every advance in optical storage.

i guess i missed the point of optical storage. however, if optical storage is the intended format... is not 4.37GB dvd the standard now?
as far as archving losslessly compressed audio, i just make regular audio-cds out of the decompressed wav's, and the COMPRESSED data is for storage on my internal hard drives, where they will be listened to, etc. and a long time ago i stopped using optical storage as a deciding factor in compressing movies, as i realized how much easier it is to copy the file to another computer, rather than putting them on cds or dvds. it takes just as long to copy over a network as it does to burn a dvd these days.. and the only thing i really use dvds for is to make dvds, and as far as that is concerned, why would i want to compress or change the format of the video if i can make it fit on a 4.37gb disk?
perhaps i missed the point of this topic 'When should we move to MPEG4 AVC?'........ and i only see the use of losslessly compressed video for an intermediary step in processing video. simply because, though my ears may be able to determine a song that has been compressed over one that has not (and not terribly so with Autov's Beta3 ogg encoder), my eyes can not tell the difference between a dvd source, and a high bitrate MPEG4 ASP compression.
also, lossless compressed audio (and i am assuming video) takes a higher amount of processing power to be played back on-the-fly. which decreases it's ability to be ported to stand-alone players. most of the people who compress movies and cds do it so they can watch them (easily and conveniently) stored on their pc. and that may be a broad statement, but i believe it to be so. it is only now becoming possible to play MPEG4 on a standalone player, which makes it a good all around choice for compression. i have heard of NO standalones that playback any type of lossless video, especially considereing MPEG2 (the dvd standard) is lossy.
the standalone player support is only a hassle to me because i use monkeys audio for my music. i know that there are players now that support FLAC, but the other distracting thing is this; when you want something to be portable, you usually want to bring as much of it with you as possible. with a lossless audio compression (60-70%) you can only save yourself 1/3rd as many cds as you would keeping the originals (which is what i do). with a lossy (ogg AUTOV beta3), you have almost the same audio quality, yet at less than 1/10th the original size. that is a savings of 90% of storage space.
until losless compression reaches the 70-90% compression stage, it will not be applicable as an consumer standard for audio OR video storage.
and if we as consumers are just now getting 8.4GB DL DVD media, how long do you think it will be before we see something ranging in the 100-200GB? years... and in those years, the lossy compression will reach a stage that will make us look at these high-volume optical storage units as strictly backups. because when AVC reaches a developmental stage that allows for higher compression with less artifacts, we will be able to fit any movie onto a single CD-Rom, and imagine how cheap a 750MB cd will be when there is a 200GB disc on the market!!!! they will be giving blank cds away like floppy discs today..
so, to summarize, when should we move to mpeg4 AVC?, whenever you are ready. if more people had moved to OGG years ago, perhaps it could have edged MP3 out of the market. i know my cd player will play ogg files, and mp3, and wma, and audio cds. if i had known how good ogg was going to be, i would have tried to acquire more over the years, however since it was almost ignored in the trading community, mp3 prevailed, and i have tons of mp3s on my system (that i hardly listen to).. so maybe if more people support AVC it will grow faster, and gain the popularity that is required for something to become 'mainstream'.
i myself go for higher bitrate compressions, so i still use an ASP codec. the final size not being as important to me as the quality, and the quality of the motion. and even if i back up to cds or dvds (not yet) i do not play the files off them, and i usually put video part one on a cd video part two on another, and the audio/chapters/subs on a third disc, which means i have to then re-mux it all to restore, or copy to another computer from the cds.
wow, this got long.. and off topic. but perhaps i made myself clear this time. lossless compression is good for certain applications where we can distinguish between the two. however, take a RAW image recorded from my camera, it looks great. but, if i take that image into photoshop, sharpen the edges, adjust the contrast & color balances, save it as a COMPRESSED jpeg, it just may end up looking better, with a smaller footprint, than the original.
dave

[video]

DaveId streamin video on demand applications and services are approaching all across the world. generally speaking, nowadays 1Mbps sustained rate for video is feasible almost everywhere where dsl services are provided. Meaning, providers are setting up PPV services. Customers wolud like, the best quality for their money, so it's an important question: which compression technology gives the best audiovisual quality through an 1Mbps transmission 'line'. A same applies for european DVB vs HDTV. The channel is approx. 5MBps wide and we would like to have 1080p transmitted over...