HD compression

[StevenBagley]

In one of the other threads we were discussing HD compressions quality (in relation to the JVC camera).

Last night, I was given a link to this site which has a 24fps 720p HD stream encoded in an MPEG1 (yes, ONE!) stream at 5Mbps.

http://www.digigami.com/megapeg/samples.php

I'm posting this more for information than anything else as I don't expect it to be of benefit in reality (not least because it was a 10:1 encode time).

Also be warned that the sample can crash Windows and Windows media player, but plays fine here on my mac in QuickTime and VLC.

Steven

[Alan Roberts]

Now that's a magnificent leap of technology, backwards :D

[mooblie]

There's life in the old dog yet!

[MattDavis]

Now that's a magnificent leap of technology, backwards :D

Aww, c'mon, man... I've been doing this HD lark for the last year now, using QT PhotoJPEG 1280x720 and 1024x576 for non G5 macs in Keynote, ditto for PCs in PPT using WM9. At least the MegaPEG MPEG 1 can kind of rationalise things, so long as 'red' is not a colour you like to use extensively in your videos.

H.264 is great if you have a G5, but no good if you don't.

Has anyone got decent (like 'almost equal to sorenson') results from MPEG4 yet?

[PaulD]

Hi
I've got 'better than Sorenson' results with QT 3gp phone-sized video encoding - by far the best MPEG-4 encoding I've seen - if you can live with the limited size/frame-rate limitations of 3gp movies.

Its a pity its not scaleable for HD :(

[cstv]

wow! that's really quite impressive! perhaps the most important feature of distributing HD content in this way is the significantly lower CPU overhead.

Running on my Athlon XP 1900+:
the 5Mbps MPEG1 in VLC uses about 35% CPU.
the 8Mbps WMVHD samples from microsoft use about 75% CPU in VLC and about 65% in Windows Media Player (IIRC VLC uses the directshow filter which is a lot less efficient than the code that WMP uses)

I realise that all things are by no means equal in that comparison, but when you consider that most people wouldn't see a huge difference between the two you can't deny the significance.

mark.