New Website: H.264info.com

[admin]

A friend of mine (with some help from yours truly, of course) has just started a new mini website to promote and provide help for H.264 video:

http://www.h264info.com/

It's a nice little website with most of the information you'll need to play, make and edit H.264 files, plus downloads for frequently used software and links to H.264 demo clips.

It's a good place to start if you don't have a clue what H.264 is and how to get it to play on your computer.

[Chewy]

I downloaded the bourne ult trailer clip, 80 MB/ 1.5 minutes
simple math of x by 60 to get a 90 min runtime would yield a 4.8 gig file size
for this mp4 file
hardly an example of smaller file size for improved quality?

as bugs would say "what's up doc?"

[admin]

But it's 1080p though ...

[Chewy]

You would need to burn to dual layer to get it on a disk and play on an xbox?

[Chewy]

as it aims in offering similar video quality in half the size of the formats mentioned before.(MPEG-2, DivX, XviD)

http://www.dvd-guides.com/content/view/143/59/

compared to mpeg2 and considering the quality I can see this statement but
at 6x the file size for xvid I don't buy it

[admin]

Or you can stream it from a PC/UPnP storage device.

I used about 7 Mbps for the trailer - if you limit the resolution to 720p, you can go down to 5 Mbps and fit about 120 minutes on a single layer disc. Of course, we're talking about fairly high quality encodes - you can get away with a much lower bitrate if you don't need 100% quality. If it was encoded in MPEG-2, it would probably need at least 15 Mbps, 20 to be safe, meaning a 90 minute movie would be 13.5 GB.

At normal resolutions, H.264 is about 20% more efficient than DivX/XviD, so you can store a 640x*** movie on a single CD with acceptable quality.

The problem now is encoding speed, as it's really slow unless you have quad-core going (and even then, it's still slow).

[admin]

http://www.dvd-guides.com/content/view/143/59/

compared to mpeg2 and considering the quality I can see this statement but
at 6x the file size for xvid I don't buy it

That statement is wrong though (I think it refers to MPEG-2, not DivX/XviD, since DivX/XviD and MPEG-2 are in a totally different class). You might say that DivX/XviD/MPEG-4 ASP was the successor to MPEG-2 , and that H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is the successor to MPEG-4 ASP.

Doom9's codec shootout is a good guide - it's dated 2005, but even back then, H.264 was the winner compared to DivX/XviD:

http://www.doom9.org/codecs-final-105-1.htm

Also, don't be completely shocked if DivX/XviD adopts MPEG-4 AVC sometime in the future.

[Chewy]

well at least showtime2 and MP10 played it beautifully, too bad my monitor wouldn't do the 1920x816

[admin]

The Bourne Ultimatum clip uses the Baseline profile, which won't require such a powerful processor. The High Profile encodes I did afterwards are a bit more demanding (but you can squeeze a bit more out of the same bitrate) - I can't play them at full frames on my P4 3.2 GHz - I get maybe 10 to 15 FPS.

The Xbox 360 plays it without a hint of a frame drop, thanks to the ATI H.264 decoders and the GPU acceleration - all the latest DX10 graphics cards (with AVIVO HD or PureVideo HD) should have H.264 accelerated decoding, so even my old P4 3.2 GHz will play High Profile encoding without too much trouble (assuming I find a way to fit the PCI-E card into my AGP slot ).

[Chewy]

are there any high profile clip samples?

[admin]

I will upload some soon, possibly by tomorrow. I'll post the link here when I do.

[admin]

Try this 1080p trailer one (this is actually an old one that I made some time ago, not Xbox 360 compatible):

http://www.dvdloc8.com/downloads/trailers/divxdigest/pirates2_1080p_trailer.zip

The 10-15 FPS figure I mentioned may not have been accurate - I think there was something wrong with that particular clip. You should get close to full framerate on P4 2.8 GHz or better CPUs (with no GPU acceleration), but you'll get 100% CPU utilization. My P4 3.2 GHz will just about play the above 1080p clip with a few frames being skipped here and there.

A Xbox 360 compatible 1080p clip (The Simpsons Movie again) has been added to h264info.com:

http://www.h264info.com/clips.html

This one should play well even on a P4 2.8 GHz, although it will be hitting 100% CPU utilization quite often. When the decoders (ffdshow) gets further optimized, performance will increase.

[Chewy]

my computer(oc'd amd64/3000) and ati 9600 choked on the first trailer, dropping frames? then freezing vid later

the second did OK I guess, probably need a better video card

[admin]

Your computer should do better than that I think (it's the CPU that matters most) - try the latest ffdshow version (clsid or xxl nightly builds) if you haven't done so already:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=173941

[Chewy]

I am playing them with showtime(part of nero6), ffdshow is pretty up to date,
I only noticed some slight pausing with the second one(may have been my imagination) cpu went from 40-100% with scene change

the first clip, there was something definitely wrong with it

how do you get the fps?