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Media (Apple) Businesses Media Software Apple

QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available 81

Posted by timothy from the apply-goodness dept.
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."
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QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available More

QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available

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  • 30" Display? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darkov ( 261309 ) on Saturday April 30, 2005 @02:24PM (#12393319)
    Makes me wish I had a Mac fast enough to play the bloody things. See http://trailers.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/reco mmendations.html [apple.com]

    fp?

    • Re:30" Display? (Score:3, Informative)

      by stereotree ( 828969 )
      Here are the stats from that page on what you need for HD to run smoothly thru Quicktime 7: (NOTE that you pretty much need a G5)

      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)

        by MBCook ( 132727 )
        For what it's worth, I tried the Batman trailer on my 1.7 GHz PowerBook G4 15" (with 1 gig of RAM) and it looked great. That said, it did drop a few frames here and there. But the fact that the video was 1280x526 and my screen is 1280x768 (or something like that) meant that it was running basically full screen at native resolution and it looked AMAZING. I would LOVE to see one of those on a 30" screen attached to a dual G5 (I'll have to try that next time I go to a computer store :).

        But they play on my lap

      • Re:30" Display? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by hna ( 612518 )
        I'm able to play most of the 720p's on my mac mini (G4 1.25GHz w/ 512M), there are however some small jerkiness in some scene changes.

        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
        • I have the faster mini, with OS X 10.3.9 and a gig of ram. The Batman trailer plays well. I noticed some very slight skipping, but I was looking for it. I am sure that if I showed it to someone without mentioning it they wouldn't notice it. In any case the picture quality is amazing.
        • Are you sure you're getting 24fps? I get about 12 on a similar machine.
      • At work I loaded QT7 on the 17" G5 iMca with 768 MB of RAM and you could visable see the frame rate drop a lot. If I wasn't now out of a job for the Summer I would try and get a G5 tower just to get the faster processer.
    • The 1280x544 Batman one worked fine in my 15" 1GH Titanium Powerbook (maybe lost a frame here and there but it was barely noticeable). I have 1GB RAM on it but I doubt that makes much of a difference.

      So in this case recommended is really recommended rather than minimal (a la Windows requirements ;o)
    • I get half the frame rate (12 fps) on my 1 GHz PowerBook Titanium (133 MHz bus). It's pretty smooth for 12 fps. Interestingly, my 1.7 GHz Cube (100 MHz bus) is more jerky, despite the 700 MHz clock speed advantage.

      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
    • Yeah, they definitely don't work on QuickTime on even relatively new iBooks.

      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. :)
  • just can't handle 'em. They play but the framerate just isn't satisfactory. I've got 1.25 Ghz G4 and 512mb ram, it is probably the lower G4 that isn't able to keep up

    It's a shame, for they are GORGEOUS!

    • Here's a funny work around for G4's and the QTHD Theatre ... :-D While the movie is downloading, go into the A/V controls (cmd-k) and set the play speed to 1/2x -- In QT7, if the format permits, it will time stretch the audio instead of frequency stretch it.

      With the movie playing at half the speed, your G4 will be able to spit out more of the frames :) The Audio will sound a little funny because of the time-stretch. It's a fun little experiment.
    • Had the same problem on a 1Ghz powerbook under 10.3. Then I loaded 10.4. If the video is completely pre-downloaded, you've got nothing else eating cpu cycles in the backgound, I got the 720p version under 10.4 to view without noticable frame dropping and skipping. All the trailers were quite watchable, even Kingdom of Heaven at the beginning where they flash a quick sequence of different secenes. Must be because of core video.

  • Good...progressive. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NotoriousQ ( 457789 ) on Saturday April 30, 2005 @02:47PM (#12393444) Homepage
    Well....given that I do not have quicktime7, nor does it seem that my linux libquicktime implementation handles this new modified quicktime format (or perhaps it has streaming problems?), I did not actually see the trailers.

    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?
    • 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.

      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.
      • Even after conversion of 1080i into 1080p, the 720p looks better. I notice the fuzz, even after all the blendings and corrections. I am actually disappointed to hear that there are channels broadcasting interlaced HDTV, as I hoped that interlacing will go away as inferior technology.
    • hmmmm... mplayer plays it, it is only that the bottom part of the screen has some artifects (mplayer: latest version, on an athlon xp 2200+ with 512MB ram, FreeBSD) - and of course it is slow! As to the big news part: it is not big news, except that it is APPLE. Some info mplayer displays:

      MOV track #1: 858 chunks, 6765 samples
      Audio bits: 16 chans: 2 rate: 48000
      Audio extra header: len=91 fcc=0x77617665
      MOV: Found MPEG4 audio Elementary Stream Descriptor atom (51)!
      Fourcc: mp4a

      and

      Opening video decoder: [f

      • Playing <a href="http://images.apple.com/movies/us/hd_gallery /gl1800/wildlife_ctp_328x185.mov">http://images.ap ple.com/movies/us/hd_gallery/gl1800/wildlife_ctp_3 28x185.mov</a>.
        Resolving images.apple.com for AF_INET...
        Connecting to server images.apple.com[199.232.159.253]:80 ...
        Cache size set to 8192 KBytes
        Connected to server: images.apple.com
        Cache fill: 0,14% (11725 bytes) QuickTime/MOV file format detected.
        Compressed header uses zlib algo!
        Compressed header size: 434 / 970
        ------------

    • Re:Good...progressive. (Score:5, Informative)

      by dr.badass ( 25287 ) on Saturday April 30, 2005 @04:00PM (#12393813) Homepage
      For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.

      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.
      • Then I was wrong in my previous post (above yours). Thanks for the info. Screenshot of jerkiness of bottom part of screen - playing the 1920x816 batman trailer [unideb.hu] (using -vo gl2 to be able to capture the screen).
      • 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.

        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)

          by dr.badass ( 25287 ) on Saturday April 30, 2005 @07:11PM (#12394920) Homepage
          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.

          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? ... Quicktime7 is the same old qt format, but the program now has a better MPEG-4 stream handling plus an AVC handler?

          My understanding is that it is the same .mov container as before. What has changed is QuickTime-the-software, which has been significantly upgraded. In other words, the file format was capable of things the software was not.

          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 .mov, and it might support H.264, but it might not support H.264 inside .mov (this example might not be true, but such things do happen). The standard specifies only two container formats: .mp4 (based on QT), and .mpg (MPEG-2/DVD style muxed streams), so it's entirely possible that there's some limitation or difference in mplayer, et al.'s .MOV support that makes it not work. Likewise, Apple may use some part or "profile" of AVC that isn't supported by mplayer yet.

          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.
          • I would choose QT over Real any day
            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 .mov
            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,
            • I meant to hit preview, and I meant to close the italics. DOH!

              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).
    • QuickTime 7 is required for H.264 playback in order to support B-frames. QuickTime's original architecture back in 1991 required that frames only reference previous frames, not future frames - a feature that is a basic requirement of H.264. Apple has been working on a major rewrite for years to get this working.

      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.

    • 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.

      • Actually if you read all the posts made above, you would notice that the downloaded file in the new format is playing just fine using mplayer, and it is the streaming that is causing the problem, as apparantly libquicktime/mplayer does not handle it.

        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

  • 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:

    Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

    (And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

    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.

    • I read the whole article, and was fascinated. There was a whole lot there that I didn't know (and most of it I understood). It was time well spent.
    • I am tired of saying it and it will be last time..

      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

    • 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. :)

      • 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. :)

        Yes, and if you'd read the entire post that you're replying to, you'd see the following:

        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

        Yes, obviously, QT7 has been made av

    • (And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

      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? :)

  • So, who wants to encode the HD Serenity trailer into DivX or something and then send it to me? Please?
  • Im running 10.3.9 and downloaded QT7 and have been enjoying the HD videos. Ive had very few frame rate problems, it might help to set my processor to highest setting. The QT window has been changed slightly and the menu has been cleaned up more, but Apple really wants people to buy Pro and they leave the pro features greyed out in the menus so you can see what your missing out on. Ill buy Pro after I update to Tiger when I get back home from school.
  • ... can get QT7 codecs fast. I really don't like using QuickTime's players to play movies. :(

  • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Great looking but FAR TOO DEMANDING. (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I don't know about the rest of you but on my G4 733 with 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9000 Pro it is a joke.

    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 .... with a few stops at 0.

    DAMN that is insane.
  • I often times find myself annoyed by software that comes attached to operatings systems (read my review of Mac OS X 10.4 [mattbaron.net] to see why Safari 2.0 is really raising my ire). The most recent culprit is Quicktime 7.

    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

  • Be careful if you have QT Pro! (Score:4, Informative)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Sunday May 01, 2005 @02:37PM (#12400039) Homepage
    When QT7 shows up in "Software Update", be careful if you have QT6 Pro. If you let it update, you will now have QT7 non-Pro. QT7 replaces QT6, and QT6 license keys do not work with QT7.

    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.

  • QuickTime 7 seems to break the AppleScript full screen hacks floating about the internet. Does anyone know of an AppleScript that restores this functionality for QT 7?

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