QuickTime 7 Report [Disappointment]

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Forget the Apple Store video. I went. There were a lot of people. Nobody could help me with my H.264 questions. I spend most of this afternoon and this evening comparing it to 3ivx. Guess what? It seems to be no better and maybe even slightly worse!!! What makes this really disappointing is this bit of text from Apple’s QuickTime 7 website:

“Thanks to its incredible efficiency, H.264 provides up to four times the frame size of video encoded with today’s MPEG-4 video codec at the same data rate.”

That’s not what I’m seeing. My H.264 and my 3ivx encoded videos look about the same quality at any given frame and file size. Actually the H.264 files have slightly less contrast and are not quite as sharp. What’s more is it takes anywhere from 3 - 8 times longer to encode your video in H.264.

On top of that, H.264 seems to be much more CPU intensive. Apple has some HD video samples available for download but they play like crap (1 - 7 fps) on my 1 year old, top of the line PowerBook. The website lists these hardware requirements for the 1280 X 720 (720p) video: 1.8GHz G5, 256MB RAM, 64MB video card. For the 1920 X 1080 (1080p) clips it jumps to: DUAL 2.0GHz G5, 512MB RAM, 128MB video card. Those are some steep requirements! I found that even the low bit-rate videos I compressed for the web have a slight delay in there response to scrubbing the playhead. I don’t have this problem at all with my 3ivx encoded videos.

What a disappointment.