I’ve heard that the h.264 codec is going to be a big thing in the near future. Is this old news? or hype? or a very good thing indeed?
windows:
http://www.mainconcept.com/h264_encoder.shtml
and for mac [hmmmmm TIGER!]
IMO it’s a very good thing indeed. I’ve wanted this for a long time. There are too many mpeg-4 based formats out there. It’s time they standardised it like mpeg-1 & mpeg-2.
Before mpeg-4 stuff came out, I used H263 encoding. I believe it was the predecessor of mpeg-4. It’s very quick at encoding and still gives very good quality.
I certainly hope that H264 replaces mpeg-2. The file sizes are much smaller and even give higher data rates. This sort of thing will make high quality video on demand possible. It looks like that’s what Apple is aiming for with their new ichat in Tiger.
In fact, I would be over the moon if they just said scrap wmv, realmedia, divx, xvid, all the old mpeg formats and everyone just use H264. The best bit about it is it’s scalable media. It excels at a large range of bitrates.
I scanned through some of the online information. It looks like one of the strongpoints is that thre will be flexibility in the COmpression side and standardization in the DECompression side.
You will still have all of your players and different s/w tools for compressing the video, but you should only need to download 1 CODEC to work on all of the players.