QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available 81
mmarlett writes "The long-anticipated release of Tiger has brought with it QuickTime 7, which was available on Thursday separately from Tiger, but not yet available for anything other than Mac OS X. That's to be expected, but as I was checking out the recent trailers for Batman Begins and Serenity, I realized that they (along with many other things) were also available as giant H.264 HD Quicktime files that require QuickTime 7. Makes me wish I had that 30" display."
30" Display? (Score:4, Insightful)
fp?
Re:30" Display? (Score:3, Informative)
Recommended Hardware Configurations for H.264 High Definition (HD) Playback
To play high definition video, a large amount of data must be processed by your computer. A powerful system will deliver the best playback experience.
For 1280x720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:
* 1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer
* At least 256 MB of RAM
* 64
Re:30" Display? (Score:3, Informative)
But they play on my lap
Re:30" Display? (Score:3, Interesting)
1080p opens and the resolution is wider than what my monitor likes (1280x1024) and resizing to fit the screen helps a little, but not even close of being viewable. A couple of frames from here and there. Sound works fine though
I think the faster mac mini will play the 720p's ok, but 1080p requires much more power...
Oh well, I didn't buy the computer to watch some traile
Re:30" Display? (Score:2)
Re:30" Display? (Score:1)
Re:30" Display? (Score:1)
Re:30" Display? (Score:2)
So in this case recommended is really recommended rather than minimal (a la Windows requirements
Apple overestimates H.264 HD hardware requirements (Score:1)
Reports are that a 1.6 GHz G5 iMac has no problem with 720p24, and plays back 1080p24 at about 15 fps. A dual 1.8 GHz G5 is needed for 1080p24. (Apple recommends a 1.8 GHz G5 and a dual 2.0 GHz G5 respectively.)
To my surprise, one report also has it that a dual 1 GHz G4 will also play back 720p2
Re:30" Display? (Score:2)
I dumped one of the 1080p ones into iMovie HD on a 1 GHz 12" iBook with 512MB of RAM. It worked fine. I used the 16:9 widescreen DV format. Granted, it lost a some detail, but it still looked beautiful at full screen (and at least it played).
It took about 15 minutes to convert the H.264 into a format that iMovie could use. Also, it was the first time that I've ever heard this iBook's fan come on.
my poor ibook (Score:1)
It's a shame, for they are GORGEOUS!
Re:my poor ibook (Score:1)
At least the 1080p ones were over the edges in 100%/default setting and fullscreen resized it to fit the screen, not that I have fast enough computer to watch those though
iBooks and HD. (Score:2)
With the movie playing at half the speed, your G4 will be able to spit out more of the frames
Re:my poor ibook (Score:2)
Good...progressive. (Score:4, Interesting)
For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.
However, due to description that the videos are 1280x768 (720p), I would like to thank the people at Apple who did not do the idiotic thing and run this at 1960x1080 (1040i) interlaced, which looks damn awful on most computer screens.
Also I would like to point out to the author of the article that one does not need a 30" cinema screen to see this in all its glory, as even my 10.4" laptop can handle 1280x768, and I have seen a 7.6" screen that handles the same resolution.
Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now. Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not? Why H.264 is such big news?
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:3, Informative)
If the original source is film (which it almost always is), then it is a relatively trivial operation to turn 1080i into 1080p which looks fantastic on most computer screens. I do it every day watching brodacast HDTV from NBC and CBS which are always 1080i.
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
and
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:5, Informative)
QuickTime is a container format, that can, er contain many different codecs. In this case, the codec in question is H.264, which is currently only available in QuickTime 7. Same format, new codec.
Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now.
ffmpeg might have had H.264 decoding support for a while, but definitely not " a few years", and encoding is till pretty fresh. As in : BIG FAT WARNING: x264 is still in early development stage. [videolan.org] (Also, many of the other existing H.264 implementations don't follow the spec, and do stupid things like use AVI containers.)
Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not?
A little of both, with a dose of marketing. QuickTime was showing it's age -- QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 implementation was a joke, mostly because of assumptions made with QuickTime 1 that no longer hold true.
The marketing comes in when you consider that the installed base of QuickTime users is more likely to upgrade if you go on about HD and pristine quality and fast downloads than APIs and architectures. It's a lot easier to get people to upgrade when you have a carrot to dangle in front of them.
Why H.264 is such big news?
The news is that it is now supported natively by a popular content creation platform, with an installed content delivery platform that is (IIRC), second only to Flash. This means that you can create H.264 content and have the reasonable expectation that people will be able to view it.
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
I will have to disagree there. The number of people viewing avi's and wmv's are much larger than the number of people who are ready to view qt's. In the nom-mac world it is more likely that a person can view realvideo than quicktime. And in that sense, wmv is the second most installed content delivery platform, with realplayer the third, putting quicktime in the fourth
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:4, Informative)
True, of course. I guess I blocked WMV from my mind because it isn't suitable for my own stuff. As for Real vs. QuickTime, I recall seeing numbers that put them very, very, close -- and as a creator, I would choose QT over Real any day -- I don't think I'm alone in that. In any event, the point was that QT7/H.264 is news because it's gone mainstream.
Also I am beginning to doubt my own understanding of MPEG-4.
It doesn't help that MPEG-4 is utterly bewildering.
So is quicktime7 a new format or not?
My understanding is that it is the same
But then in that case if they had released these trailers before qt7, the only people who would not be able to play them are the people with Quicktime players, while people with mplayer will have had no problems.
Not quite. It's more confusing than that. Players don't always support every format in every container that they support. mplayer might support
So, my conclusion there is "Maybe. MPEG-4 is confusing. My head hurts."
I've read elsewhere of people using H.264 video + MP3 audio inside AVI containers, which is so incredibly non-standard that it makes me dizzy.
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
QT is definitely better overall, although Real gives me an impression of being better over extremely low bandwidth links.
but it might not support H.264 inside
This is probably unlikely. The container is supposed to provide locality on the streams, and seeking for really really dumb streams. Basically, the QT driver should simply unpack the stream and just forward it to any codec that it knows how to forward to. In windows, that compatibility is given by directshow,
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:1)
And I hate slashdot's 2 min delay!
and huh?
A user had given a moderation of Interesting (+1) to your comment, Good...progressive., attached to QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available. That moderation has now been undone, probably due to the user posting in the discussion after moderating in it. Your comment is currently scored Normal (1).
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:3, Informative)
The good news is that out of order playback means better MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 Part 2 implementations are also now technically possible within QuickTime.
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:2)
nor does it seem that my linux libquicktime implementation handles this new modified quicktime format (or perhaps it has streaming problems?)
These new features are only available in QuickTime 7, which in turn is only available for OS X at present. Anything that relies on Windows DLLs from QuickTime, such as mplayer, will not yet work with the HD trailers and such.
Re:Good...progressive. (Score:3, Informative)
Notice no Windows DLLs were used in the running of the file. libquicktime was handling the qt wrapper, while ffmpeg was playing the movie without any trouble.
As for the Windows, I would imagine that anyone with Quicktime Alternative dshow plugin can play these
John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica (Score:5, Informative)
For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section [arstechnica.com] of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review [arstechnica.com] for Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme [arstechnica.com] and CoreImage [arstechnica.com]. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:
The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.
Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther [arstechnica.com] and previous versions [arstechnica.com] have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.
Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica (Score:1)
Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica (Score:3, Interesting)
Asking for money, from Mac users to play stuff fullscreen, especially after h264 is a great idea.
I better tell it that way...
Happy with Helix based Realplayer 10 for mac here. Yes, it plays h264 fullscreen, outperforms quicktime on fps too. It uses quicktime framework you know...
Just lets hope nobody will code a "quicktime 133t all key generator" trojan/malware. If it happens and becomes a scandal, look no place else than Apple. No, I don't need editi
Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica (Score:3, Interesting)
Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered
Hmm, well... I'm using QuickTime 7 on 10.3, and the QuickTime web site has a little bit that says... "Use QuickTime Player in Mac OS X Tiger or get QuickTime 7 for Panther to see for yourself. :)
Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica (Score:2)
Yes, and if you'd read the entire post that you're replying to, you'd see the following:
Yes, obviously, QT7 has been made av
Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica (Score:2)
Ha, all mine are self-contained AVI files. I wish they'd use external subs, some of the "Hey, let's change text colour for every character/on-screen/off-screen moment!" subs are horrendous.
Oh well, whaddya want for free? :)
Please? (Score:1)
Re:Please? (Score:2)
Re:H.264 is not new (Score:1)
taking a 720x540 dvd a applying the codec to it does not give you hi def quality video. hi def comes from actually re-mastering the video at HD resolution of 1920 x 1080 with all the increased pixel detail.
what you are doing is the almost the equivalent like taking at 72 dpi image into photoshop, making it 300 dpi. in neither case is quality improved.
Re:H.264 is not new (Score:2)
Fair enough. There is a little improvement, though. The artifacts caused by encoding are smaller. (Though the data rate is higher...)
my Powerbook (Score:1)
I hope MPlayer and QuickTime Alternative... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1, Troll)
Re:Quicktime USED to be nice, but... (Score:2)
You
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Quicktime USED to be nice, but... (Score:1)
Are you blind, or just trolling? There's a link from the main Quicktime download page to this page, which has a standalone installer [apple.com].
I guess you were just looking for something to bitch about. Maybe you can ask Apple for a refund of the money you paid for the download.
Re: (Score:2)
Reinstall Quicktime 6 (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime6
Re:qt7 sucks (Score:1)
That's not because Quicktime is bloated, it's because your system does not meet the specs for playing HD video. Didn't you read the recommended system specs for playing these back?
Great looking but FAR TOO DEMANDING. (Score:1, Informative)
I turned off all programs except Quicktime even turned off dashboard widgets (Running Tiger) and I sized the QT window to 1/2 native resolution and the informaiton window told me it was running between 3 and 9 FPS
DAMN that is insane.
Re:Great looking but FAR TOO DEMANDING. (Score:1)
Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:2, Insightful)
I happen to be one of many people who shelled out the necessary bones for the Pro version of Quicktime 6. So what does apple do to us loyal customers when we upgrade our operating system? Poof, no more Quicktime Pro.
But wait a sec, what if I was satisfied with Quicktime 6? What if the features
Re:Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:2)
From: george@ellenburg.org
Subject: tip|QuickTime 7, 6, and Tiger [George Ellenburg]
Date: April 30, 2005 8:57:42 PM EDT
To: sub2005@macintouch.com
personname=George Ellenburg
other=QuickTime 7, 6, and Tiger
TopicType=tip
This is the follow-up to your hint about having both QuickTime 6 & 7 installed at the same time.
If readers want to re-
Re:Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:1)
Re:Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:1)
Re:Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:2)
Re:Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:2)
Re:Quicktime 7 obliterates software I paid for... (Score:2)
Be careful if you have QT Pro! (Score:4, Informative)
This strikes me as an extremely obnoxious thing for Apple to have done. It seems to me that anything that shows up in "Software Update" should be just that: an update that will fix bugs and add new functionality, rather than replace your paid version of the software with the crippled free version of the next major release.
QT 7 and AppleScript (Score:1)