Apple posts H.264 HD gallery

[xtknight]

I'm attempting to make a QT7 video player. Not sure how I'm going to do it...but I'm going to try. 😛 Or, a QT7 splitter DirectShow filter (.ax). Shouldn't be extremely hard if there was a specification on the QuickTime format. The reason is I notice inconsistencies. I can play certain QT7 files and I don't know what's going on. I'm going to try and make a filter that plays all files.

 

[xtknight]

There's some pretty amazing NASA MPGE2 HD content here. Playable in Moonlight Player 3.0.1 alpha. <a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/">ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/</a></a></a>

The smallest one (abc.mpg, 324 MB) took me 10 minutes to download and I might even be able to stream it. Awesome quality.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: xtknight
There's some pretty amazing NASA H.264 content here. Playable in Moonlight Player 3.0.1 alpha. <a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/">ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/</a></a></a>

The smallest one (abc.mpg, 324 MB) took me 10 minutes to download and I might even be able to stream it. Awesome quality.

Are those definitely H.264? They don't play in QuickTime 7 on the Mac. They play in Video LAN Client, but that app just says they're MPG files, whatever they mean by that.

Originally posted by: Eug
Here is a post comparing H.264 to VC-1 and lots of other codecs. It contains a link to a zip file with the actual clips.

The difference here is that it's from a pro who demos codecs and teaches about this stuff for a living. Furthermore the source video is non-compressed and is licenced from Dreamworks. It's not a re-encode from a DVD or anything like that.

I have not yet tried the VC-1 clip, since I won't have access to a Windows PC until tomorrow. (I'm too lazy to get my PC out of the closet. 😛) However, out of the other ones I tried, Apple's H.264 wins by a large margin. No contest. I expect the VC-1 to be equal or come close though but like I said I haven't tried it yet.

What surprised me was how bad Squeeze's H.264 encode was though. The Apple H.264 is head and shoulders better, at a much lower bitrate.

So I finally got around to testing some of these clips on my Windows XP box. (WMP 10 doesn't install on Win 2000.)

The Apple H.264 clip, despite being a lower bitrate, blew the WMP Advanced Profile (VC-1) clip out the water. No contest. Furthermore, the H.264 looked equally good in the Moonlight player as it did in QuickTime 7.

Originally posted by: xtknight
I'm attempting to make a QT7 video player. Not sure how I'm going to do it...but I'm going to try. 😛 Or, a QT7 splitter DirectShow filter (.ax). Shouldn't be extremely hard if there was a specification on the QuickTime format. The reason is I notice inconsistencies. I can play certain QT7 files and I don't know what's going on. I'm going to try and make a filter that plays all files.

Cool. Above my head. 😛

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Eug

Originally posted by: xtknight
There's some pretty amazing NASA H.264 content here. Playable in Moonlight Player 3.0.1 alpha. <a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/"><a target=_blank class=ftalternatingbarlinklarge href="ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/">ftp://ftp.cmf.nrl.navy.mil/pub/iHDTV/</a></a></a></a></a>

The smallest one (abc.mpg, 324 MB) took me 10 minutes to download and I might even be able to stream it. Awesome quality.

Are those definitely H.264? They don't play in QuickTime 7 on the Mac. They play in Video LAN Client, but that app just says they're MPG files, whatever they mean by that.

Originally posted by: Eug
Here is a post comparing H.264 to VC-1 and lots of other codecs. It contains a link to a zip file with the actual clips.

The difference here is that it's from a pro who demos codecs and teaches about this stuff for a living. Furthermore the source video is non-compressed and is licenced from Dreamworks. It's not a re-encode from a DVD or anything like that.

I have not yet tried the VC-1 clip, since I won't have access to a Windows PC until tomorrow. (I'm too lazy to get my PC out of the closet. 😛) However, out of the other ones I tried, Apple's H.264 wins by a large margin. No contest. I expect the VC-1 to be equal or come close though but like I said I haven't tried it yet.

What surprised me was how bad Squeeze's H.264 encode was though. The Apple H.264 is head and shoulders better, at a much lower bitrate.

So I finally got around to testing some of these clips on my Windows XP box. (WMP 10 doesn't install on Win 2000.)

The Apple H.264 clip, despite being a lower bitrate, blew the WMP Advanced Profile (VC-1) clip out the water. No contest. Furthermore, the H.264 looked equally good in the Moonlight player as it did in QuickTime 7.

Originally posted by: xtknight
I'm attempting to make a QT7 video player. Not sure how I'm going to do it...but I'm going to try. 😛 Or, a QT7 splitter DirectShow filter (.ax). Shouldn't be extremely hard if there was a specification on the QuickTime format. The reason is I notice inconsistencies. I can play certain QT7 files and I don't know what's going on. I'm going to try and make a filter that plays all files.

Cool. Above my head. 😛

Dammit. You're right, it's not H.264. The dood that posted that on doom9 was wrong I guess. I believe it's MPEG2. PureVideo accelerates it for me.

 

[eelw]

Originally posted by: Eug
The Apple H.264 clip, despite being a lower bitrate, blew the WMP Advanced Profile (VC-1) clip out the water. No contest. Furthermore, the H.264 looked equally good in the Moonlight player as it did in QuickTime 7.

Would you mind converting a clip in both QT7 and Moonlight AVC OneClick Compressor. I curious to see if there are any differences in codecs used.

 

[Eug]

I tried installing that Moonlight AVC OneClick Compressor, but it won't let me do anything. It says I need to activate it, despite being a 3-week evaluation version. That computer isn't even networked either, which would make activation hard too. 😛

BTW, that guy who provided the clips for the codec shootout claims that at normal broadcast bitrates, H.264 and VC-1 are neck and neck, but that VC-1 doesn't do as well for very low bitrates. ie. For SD and HD, VC-1 and H.264 are the same, but for very low bandwidth web content, VC-1 is not recommended.

Assuming those Biker Boyz demo clips are optimally encoded, the results seem to bear out that statement. The low bitrate VC-1 clip was very unimpressive.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Eug
I tried installing that Moonlight AVC OneClick Compressor, but it won't let me do anything. It says I need to activate it, despite being a 3-week evaluation version. That computer isn't even networked either, which would make activation hard too. 😛

BTW, that guy who provided the clips for the codec shootout claims that at normal broadcast bitrates, H.264 and VC-1 are neck and neck, but that VC-1 doesn't do as well for very low bitrates. ie. For SD and HD, VC-1 and H.264 are the same, but for very low bandwidth web content, VC-1 is not recommended.

Assuming those Biker Boyz demo clips are optimally encoded, the results seem to bear out that statement. The low bitrate VC-1 clip was very unimpressive.

Well it wanted me to activate something I think too. Somehow I got to the program without activating it. I think I closed the activation window and just started the program and it worked fine. It was supposed to be a trial anyway. 😕

 

[eelw]

*cough* keygen *cough* 🙂

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Well it wanted me to activate something I think too. Somehow I got to the program without activating it. I think I closed the activation window and just started the program and it worked fine. It was supposed to be a trial anyway. 😕

Maybe I'm just stupid and missing something. However, I can't drag and drop anything into it, and when I press on the ... button to open a file, nothing happens.

 

[Lonyo]

Moonlight and the BBC 1080 was about 9.5fps for me all the way through.
Athlon XP at 2200MHz with a 9800.

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
Moonlight and the BBC 1080 was about 9.5fps for me all the way through.
Athlon XP at 2200MHz with a 9800.

Table updated

That's the Athlon XP 3200+ right? I will point out that xtknight gets 21 fps with his Athlon 64 3500+ 2.2 GHz.

 

[Auric]

Eug, I see you listed my result as 22.5 but that is during the first few seconds while the final average is 23.97. The reason I did not see that initially is because I was momentarily opening the filter renderer (info) rather than enabling the view statistics option. Too bad the Overlay Mixer still cannot report any such stats as it is generally the fastest, especially sans HT.

 

[xtknight]

Yeah, it really depends which renderer the user is using (overlay or VMR9). With overlay, I get full frame rate, but with VMR9 I get about 10 FPS.

 

[Auric]

How are you gettings stats with Overlay Mixer?

I use VMR7 since it allows Theater Mode (unlike VMR9) and reads aspect ratio flags correcty from WMV files (unlike OMR).

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: Auric
How are you gettings stats with Overlay Mixer?

I use VMR7 since it allows Theater Mode (unlike VMR9) and reads aspect ratio flags correcty from WMV files (unlike OMR).

Just the normal way? Right click in Moonlight player or Properties on the Overlay Mixer in graphedit. I can confirm it's a lot smoother than with VMR9, by using my eyes. What is theater mode?

 

[Auric]

The "normal way" for me is to open the filter from Media Player Classic 😛

I didn't bother much with the Moonlight player.

Theater Mode is playing video full-screen on a secondary monitor (TV) while windowed or minimized on the primary (PC).

 

[Eug]

PC video leadership extended with first hardware accelerated public H.264 demonstration at Computex

MARKHAM, Ontario & TAIPEI, Taiwan--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 26, 2005-- ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX:ATY)(NASDAQ:ATYT) solidifies its PC video and display leadership with the first public demonstration of high-definition H.264 video playback with hardware acceleration on the PC platform. H.264 is the video compression standard that will be used in the next generation high-definition video players such as Blu-ray and HD-DVD. The ATI H.264 video demonstration with ATI's next generation Radeon® technology will occur during Computex Taipei 2005 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel.

H.264 is a new video compression standard that's designed to have two to three times the compression efficiency of current schemes such as MPEG-2, while simultaneously improving overall image quality. This increased compression efficiency is highly computationally demanding, therefore graphics hardware assistance is crucial for real-time decoding of high bit-rate video. Working with industry leaders including CyberLink Corp., ATI's Radeon graphics acceleration technology meets the high-definition and computational demands of H.264.

 

[eelw]

Cool. I wonder when will this h.264 chip will be available?

 

[Eug]

Originally posted by: eelw
Cool. I wonder when will this h.264 chip will be available?

AnandTech: ATI R520 sighting

Hardware: Pentium 4 3.6 GHz (with HT) & ATI R520
Video clip: 25 Mbps H.264 HD.

CPU only playback: 90-95% CPU utilization
GPU assisted playback: 33% CPU utilization

ATI has committed to us that they would have a H.264 player available by the end of this year that would offer this level of acceleration when paired with a R520 GPU. ATI said they were looking into bringing the acceleration to older GPUs, but they would not say anything beyond that.

 

[Avalon]

Moonlight fails to install for me, and then deletes itself.

 

[Auric]

What is the bitrate on the BBC 1080 clip? Am I mistaken or is it roughy a third that of the ATI demo?

 

[Eug]

Yeah, the BBC demo is 8.38 Mbps.

I have no idea why the ATI H.264 clip is 25 Mbps. That would make more sense if it were MPEG2, but for 1080p, 25 Mbps simply isn't necessary.

 

[Eug]

1) Apple has added 480p H.264 files to their H.264 gallery.

2) Here is a (legal) Torrent of an HD DVD (1.8 GB), which has 1080i60 and 1080p24 MPEG2 as well as 720i60 and 720p24 H.264. It plays fine with OS X Tiger's DVD Player 4.6. I dunno what is needed to play it on the Windows or Linux side.