Apple will soon be releasing a groundbreaking/all definition codec for quicktime called H.264.
I had the opportunity of seeing H.264 in action and talked to one of the head engineers of it, a young Check woman who's name I never took note of. The Codec will take a lot of proccessing to encode but it decodes so fast and preserves color amazingly! It's a 4:2:1 Mpeg-4 High quality codec with an inherant chroma shift of +2 that counters the compression effects. I've seen the previews of the movie Troy encoded in 1080p 24 FPS playing off the standard hard drive that comes with the machine. It played flawlessly and with no artifacts. 1 layer of 1080p on Apple's Seagate 160gb SATA hard drive is amazing. I've also seen it decoding 3 streams simultaneously, 1 720p, 1 ntsc, and one half size clip on the same setup.
This codec will be the one to watch when it comes out. The engineer doesn't know yet what Apple's reccomended equipment requirements will be to encode content with this codec but apparently it is very slow to encode and takes advantage of dual proccesor mac G5s as well as the 64 bit architecture. I would venture to guess you will at least need a G5 but you never know with Apple.
I've attached a white paper on non-Apple Quicktime H.264 for those of you who are masochists for technobable.
H.264 Codec, Wow
Reply With Quote