New compression codec coming (eventually)

riredale wrote on 9/26/2002, 2:24 AM

You think MPEG2 is pretty hot stuff? Technology just keeps getting better and better. It seems that the recently-introduced Windows Media 9 codec represented a high-water mark for low-bitrate compression quality, but now there's a new kid in town: H.264. It was known as H.26L until recently, and apparently it can be used to create DVD-quality video streams at about 1.25Mb/sec.

Oh, the only problem is that it is extremely CPU hungry: a Pentium IV running at 2GHz can encode 1 frame in 10 seconds. The demos given at the recent IBC conference used PCs with h/w accelerator cards.

Here's a link to the article--

http://www.eet.com/issue/mn/OEG20020920S0049

Comments

jeffy82 wrote on 9/26/2002, 8:14 AM

You have to love the American Market economy, IT DOES WORK. MPEG4LA, you can count you last days right next to the pennies you will be collecting from your ridiculous pay per use licensing requirements you forced upon Apple & Quicktime.

I wonder if that had any influence on Tim Schaaff (Apple Computer Inc) when he made the statement, "H.264 is 'no doubt the best codec there is, offering a great coding efficiency,'"

Finally, I'm not sure how well H.264 will be able to capture and retain the Darkest shades of Blacks in each (and every)frame , the way Divx 5.02 does when imported into VV. :-P

jeffy82@aol.com