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H.264 vs. WMV HD

B

bjc112

Lifer
Why is it that H.264 requires more CPU power?

I personally think H.264 @ 1080p looks better than WMV, but the power req. are quite a bit different..

I can utilize 70% of my X2 on a 1080p H.264..

1080p step into liquid (WMV) only uses about 18%..

Any specific reasons?

Why did apple pull its 1080p downloads from the website?
 
There is hardware acceleration for WMV-HD. While h.264 is purely software, at least for now. The 1080p files are still available. Just view page source, search for "1080" and grab the links. Then download however you want.
 
Originally posted by: Ig
There is hardware acceleration for WMV-HD. While h.264 is purely software, at least for now. The 1080p files are still available. Just view page source, search for "1080" and grab the links. Then download however you want.
Click to expand...

I thought WMV was only hardware on a 6600GT or 6800 NON GT or Ultra..

Thanks for the tip on Viewing source!

Why would they pull the 1080p links though?
 
ATI has WMV acceleration as well. I think since Catalyst 4.10.

Edit: I've never seen the links for 1080p. I've always thought they used their QT plugin to determine who gets shown what links. Like Apple + dual g5 + latest QT player = 1080p and Windows + anything + QT7 beta = 720p.
 
Yeah, your X850 is accelerating WMV HD. You can disable it via the Control Panel if you want to see CPU usage without the X850 helping out.
 
Originally posted by: Ig
ATI has WMV acceleration as well. I think since Catalyst 4.10.

Edit: I've never seen the links for 1080p. I've always thought they used their QT plugin to determine who gets shown what links. Like Apple + dual g5 + latest QT player = 1080p and Windows + anything + QT7 beta = 720p.
Click to expand...

No when it first arrived there was 1080p links.. 480,720 and 1080p..

I was thinking since it said Mac Only in a couple areas, they might have just pulled it!




Is there a quality difference between H.264 and WMV?
 
I wonder if my x850xt even helps..

Disabled WMV acceleration.

StepintoLiquid 1080p

Affinity set to CPU 0

Never break 25% ( or 50% on one core )

With it on it's maybe 18% on the one core... So nothing impressive really..

 
Originally posted by: Ig
There is hardware acceleration for WMV-HD. While h.264 is purely software, at least for now. The 1080p files are still available. Just view page source, search for "1080" and grab the links. Then download however you want.
Click to expand...

Damn....nice call! Thank you 🙂
 
CPU use for me under 1080:
H.264 QT7 Pro - 67% (Brother's Grimm Trailer)
WMV HD - 41% - (Amazing Caves Imax)

Subejectively, the WMVHD looks better to me.
 
Originally posted by: Stangs55
CPU use for me under 1080:
H.264 QT7 Pro - 67% (Brother's Grimm Trailer)
WMV HD - 41% - (Amazing Caves Imax)

Subejectively, the WMVHD looks better to me.
Click to expand...

Hmm..

The Cornel HD nature video looks amazing.. I don't see anything in WMV that comes close...

Do you have a LCD or CRT?
 
Originally posted by: bjc112
Originally posted by: Stangs55
CPU use for me under 1080:
H.264 QT7 Pro - 67% (Brother's Grimm Trailer)
WMV HD - 41% - (Amazing Caves Imax)

Subejectively, the WMVHD looks better to me.
Click to expand...

Hmm..

The Cornel HD nature video looks amazing.. I don't see anything in WMV that comes close...

Do you have a LCD or CRT?
Click to expand...

A 23" LCD running at 1920x1200 🙂
 
Both look awesome. And who cares about CPU percentage. Whether your CPU is at 70% or 30% its still playing.

I have been watching HD movies for about a year now and can honestly say TS has them all beat out.

TS being the most popular HD recorded format.
WMV9 and HD-Mpeg 2 are about tie for second.
HD-Divx is sadly making 4th place. Guess no one wants to tie up a machine converting HD to HD-Divx.
H264 is gaining but still I would say in 5th place for those using the codec.

The only problem with HD is the space requirements. While a movie in WMV9 and HD Divx can fit onto todays DVD's.
TS and H264 dont and most people like me dont want to change a disc 2-6 times to watch a movie.

LOTR HD ROTK takes up 6 single layered DVD's in TS format. 3 in Dual Layered.

What we need is about a 27gig media to solve this problem. And with that I am sick about hearing about Blue Ray and HD-DVD. Its all vaporware until I can buy one at the store.
 
Originally posted by: Stangs55
CPU use for me under 1080:
H.264 QT7 Pro - 67% (Brother's Grimm Trailer)
WMV HD - 41% - (Amazing Caves Imax)

Subejectively, the WMVHD looks better to me.
Click to expand...

That's because the QT piece of crap takes up 20% cpu just to run the program alone 😛
 
What is TS? If this 'TS' takes up three times as much space as WMV9, then it sould be better, wouldn't you say 😛 I am certainly not complaining about the quality of the WMV 1080p movies. It is such a far cry from DVD no matter what format you use that I am happy either way, but let us all cheer for an open standard...
 
TS would be Transport Stream, which is a repackaged MPEG HD of the raw data. Of course it looks better as it is huge and runs at 19-25Mbps and up to 50Mbps. 😀

I have seen instances where DivX HD does look better than WMV-HD, it just matters on tuning (see Step Into Liquid on 720p for wow). But man is H.264 in the current iteration a pig! My dual Xeon with a 9600XT chocks on it at 1080p. I think I remember that "Standiing in the Shadows of Motown was 720p at 8100+kbps in WMV-HD (8Mbps).
 
Originally posted by: Pabster
H.264
DiVX HD
WMV HD

In that order.
Click to expand...

NOT!

TS is current king with the highest distribution. Thats because the earliest methods of recording HD was through the firewire ports on HD receivers and still is probably the best today. I suspect when Direct TV moves to MPEG 4 this will die off except among the Dish Network setups.

WMV9 and HD-MPEG are second mainly because of computer video cards recording in HD-MPEG2. WMV9 because some are converting TS and HD-MPEG2 to WMV9 because of its shrink ability.

HD-DIVX I believe it too sadly overlooked because most see the tech as cruddy because of those who dont tune the compression properly.

H264 is still a joke. Just like everyone is stating in here. Its a CPU hog. Its gaining in popularity but hard to tell where it is going if anywhere. Its a good combination of quality and compression and its not too late like OGG trying to compete with MP3. Time will tell but the others have bigger backers and have a major lead.
 
Originally posted by: HDTVMan

TS is current king with the highest distribution. Thats because the earliest methods of recording HD was through the firewire ports on HD receivers and still is probably the best today. I suspect when Direct TV moves to MPEG 4 this will die off except among the Dish Network setups.
Click to expand...
As a footnote and verification... I have to use HDTVtoMPEG to strip the transport stream header from those files so that I can edit them... 😀 My editor does native packetized streams.

Edit - which is what Pinnacle Studio 10 should be able to do.
 
H264 is still a joke. Just like everyone is stating in here. Its a CPU hog. Its gaining in popularity but hard to tell where it is going if anywhere.
Click to expand...

AVC is no joke, and it will be the transmission format for European Satallite HD broadcasts. It offers superior compression over MPEG-2 transport streams. It was written by the Video Coding Experts Group and Moving Picture Experts Group and is technically identical to MPEG-4 part 10. You might remember them as they also wrote H.262 otherwise known as MPEG-2, which fared pretty well.
 
Originally posted by: HDTVMan
NOT!

TS is current king with the highest distribution. Thats because the earliest methods of recording HD was through the firewire ports on HD receivers and still is probably the best today. I suspect when Direct TV moves to MPEG 4 this will die off except among the Dish Network setups.

WMV9 and HD-MPEG are second mainly because of computer video cards recording in HD-MPEG2. WMV9 because some are converting TS and HD-MPEG2 to WMV9 because of its shrink ability.
Click to expand...

Of course the absolute best quality is not to use ANY of the compressed formats. I was speaking to the compressed formats only. And, with that, I stand by the order I posted.

H264 is still a joke. Just like everyone is stating in here. Its a CPU hog. Its gaining in popularity but hard to tell where it is going if anywhere. Its a good combination of quality and compression and its not too late like OGG trying to compete with MP3. Time will tell but the others have bigger backers and have a major lead.
Click to expand...

H.264 isn't that bad. And quality-wise it trumps the other two options for compressed HD.
 
Originally posted by: rbV5
H264 is still a joke. Just like everyone is stating in here. Its a CPU hog. Its gaining in popularity but hard to tell where it is going if anywhere.
Click to expand...

AVC is no joke, and it will be the transmission format for European Satallite HD broadcasts. It offers superior compression over MPEG-2 transport streams. It was written by the Video Coding Experts Group and Moving Picture Experts Group and is technically identical to MPEG-4 part 10. You might remember them as they also wrote H.262 otherwise known as MPEG-2, which fared pretty well.
Click to expand...

To say the least. MPEG-2 has had a long, long life. H.264 is hardly a joke.
 
Originally posted by: Pabster
To say the least. MPEG-2 has had a long, long life. H.264 is hardly a joke.
Click to expand...
Definitely not a joke, but the decode 'code' needs a code review and rewrite... Or I should say, Apple needs to do so. Other H.264 implementations are not that painful.
 
I have been doing a little research into AVC encoding lately preparing for the release of H264 players and hardware decoding of upcoming graphic cards.

Its impressively scalable, from low bitrate encodings all the way to full resolution HD. Using Nero recode which now has AVC support, I easily backed up LOTR "Return of the King" to a single CD with pretty damn good PQ (not bad for 03:20:57!). Easily besting anything I could come up with using WMV or Divx. It plays back fine using ffdshow ~ 10 to 16% cpu utilization on my stock AMD64 3000+.
 
If anything, the DivX6 HD profile is a joke. It's not even a true 720p resolution. Yes, transport streams are the norm, but AVC/h.264 will surplant it in the near future. And as more and more HW h.264 decoding (R520 will support this) chipsets will become available, the performance issues won't an issue.
 
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