Lots of HD trailers at Apple's Quicktime site (1 Viewer)

[KylePete]

This thread on the AVS Forum should be helpful. And sorry if this is not allowed or is rude to post a link to another forum.

Posts #19 and #20 are from Microsoft employees. Basically, H.264 is a lot slower than WMV-HD at decode.

 

[Kwang Suh]

The Harry Potter video uses about 50% CPU on my Pentium M 750 w/ 1GB memory.

 

[Eric Patterson]

Not wanting to get into a codec war here, but one of the big negatives that would come along with trailers coming out in WMVHD - if that suddenly became the "standard" - is that Mac OS X and Linux users suddenly get screwed. With H.264, people on all three platforms have media players that can handle playback. H.264 may not play back 100% smooth right now on Windows, but WMVHD doesn't play back AT ALL on Mac OS X, and I would assume the same is true for Linux.

Until I see some clear-cut comparisons between WMVHD and H.264, I find it a bit hard to accept that MS's flavor is a huge step better. I also prefer to support H.264 for political reasons - WMVHD is another attempt by MS to control a market with their own technology, where as H.264 is a joint effort between a group of companies all working towards a common goal. (Yes, the truth isn't so touchy-feely nice as that, but a lot more so the case than with MS.)

H.264, even though technically existing for a while now, is just beginning to come into its own. As with any "next gen" codec, things need to be smoothed out, and they will. But when you look around at the amount of support it has, the amount of devices choosing to throw their weight behind it, I think H.264 is going to be a pretty big player in the codec "wars."

Also, for anybody on Windows having trouble with H.264, have you also tried alternate media players, such as VLC? I wouldn't be surprised if there are still some bugs being worked out in the Windows version of QT7, even beyond support or non-support for video cards.

 

[PeterTHX]

Comparisons have been made by Joe Kane and others. MS VC-1 is better & more efficient, not to mention not as CPU intensive.

"Political" indeed. If you do some more research you'll find that MS VC-1 is an "open" codec, MS cannot control it. They did this to be considered by both the HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc forums, which both in turn adopted it.

If VC-1 doesn't play back on Linux or OS-X it is their fault. In order to play back Blu-ray or HD-DVD they MUST support it the same way they do MPEG2 for DVD.

It wouldn't hurt once in a while to admit MS did something RIGHT.

 

[Sam Davatchi]

Yipppiieee! I finally get smooth playback.

After the suggestion of VLC, I tried it and got smooth playback. So that cleared that it’s a software player problem, so I checked if a newer quick time is available. Mine was 7.0.2 and saw that a 7.0.3 is available. Installed it and now I get smooth play back with quick time too. The only dilemma is that VLC is free and can play fullscreen for free but I don’t get audio. Do I need an AAC codec or plugin for VLC?

 

[Ken Chan]

Any links? I see him saying VC-1 is better than MPEG-2 -- no surprise there -- and where Microsoft was more pro-active in working with him to iron out bugs in the codec than the H.264 camp -- also no surprise -- but no blanket statements like that.

This slide deck is interesting. While it's mostly mumbo-jumbo and pretty pictures, slide #7 is telling:

• VC-1: lower computational complexity, without "significant" performance loss
• H.264: the most complex within "reason of practicality"

If VC-1 was simply "twice as good" then H.264 would be a non-starter. Hopefully you're getting something with that complexity.

 

[Sam Davatchi]

No, I just installed VLC. I'm just too lazy to uninstall Quick Time 7.0.3 and go back to 7.0.2 just for a test.
About the Audio with VLC, strangely enough it plays the audio of King Kong for example which is AAC 2 channels but it cannot play Potter’s audio which is AAC 5.1.