Talk:Advanced Video Coding

Apple iPod?

The Apple iPod and iTouch/iPhone all support a version of the H.264 codec called "low-complexity" baseline. Even though this is not an approved profile, it would seem documenting this is pretty important given the ubiquitos nature of the Apple products. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.107.0.101 (talk) 18:04, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Reply: However, this is a wiki about the standard of h.264. The standard does not define a low-complexity baseline profile. It may still be worth mentioning. ALSO there is now the Constrained Baseline Profile (CBP) listed as profile, which is as well not a part of the specifications. AFAIK. If someone could point me to the ITU-T h.264 document and page where the CBP is described? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Oliver.stampfli (talk • contribs) 02:17, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the "Constrained Baseline Profile", please see JVT-AC204. —Mulligatawny (talk) 20:37, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

CopyVio?

http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/H.264 seems very similar —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.207.199.32 (talk) 17:51, 1 April 2008 (UTC)

QuickTime H.264 capabilities are out of date

As of QuickTime 7.2 and later, additional H.264 features such as 8x8dct and other aspects of High Profile are now supported. I've added a couple of these myself, but a review would be good - there may be other H.264 features QuickTime now supports. - 209.91.141.250 (brad) 7 February 2008

Much too technical

There is such a thing as too much information. I'm sure videophiles would be thoroughly interested in reading about logarithmic step size control and macroblock-adaptive frame-field coding, but the average wikipedia user would leave this article feeling like they've learnt nothing more about H264. This article needs to be more like the WMV article, so that the user's most common questions (i.e. what is the quality like, how do I use it, where can I play it) can be answered. This article doesn't even have anything on subjective quality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.107.140.52 (talk) 03:55, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

Seconded. I added a {{technical}} tag to the article. Could an knowledgeable individual please generalize it a bit for the mass audience? -Clueless (talk) 02:49, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

Wrong. It is a great article. You guys just need to learn more about this area to be able to understand it.-anon —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.131.8.26 (talk) 19:56, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

I agree with anon. I think it's a darn good article, and I fear what an "improvement" might look like. —Pawnbroker (talk) 18:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

ProSieben

ProSieben stopped broadcasting HDTV this year in february. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.83.90.225 (talk) 11:51, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

Hardware Requirement?

If your computer doesn't have at least a Pentium 4, the video will not play, or play right. Why is this not mentioned? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.185.14.219 (talk) 23:33, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

• Because such a statement is completely incorrect, given that H.264 video can range in bitrate and resolution nearly arbitrarily. In terms of CPU requirement for playback, H.264 is probably not even 50% more than that of MPEG-4 ASP at the same bitrate. —Dark•Shikari^[T] 02:23, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

codec's don't work that way, as u could easily decode it on any decent GPU regardless of your cpu. i've seen someone decode it on a Ati AGP GPU with a 733mhz Pentium3 @1080P~25mbps. video decoding can be completely done without a fast CPU, as long as there is some form of co-processor. Markthemac (talk) 06:38, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Availability of the codec

The article doesn't answer the question where the codec is actually used. In fact, I think it is deliberately avoided as an issue, because the public isn't supposed to be able to get it from free sources, outside formal markets. It seems that the only consumer source is the commercial Quicktime Pro, but that isn't mentioned either. All other users are big corporations who have obviously bought hefty rights to use it. Someone fix this. EDIT: I found that the open source community's free Avidemux is able to save x264 files, which is somehow different from H.264, but still the same quality. Teemu Ruskeepää (talk) 07:35, 6 July 2008 (UTC)

Actually there's a lot of information in the article about where the codec is used. For example, see the "Applications" section of the article. There used to be more such information in the article, but people complained that there was too much of it, so a new article was created that's listed in the "See also" section: H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Products and Implementations. The remark about Quicktime Pro being the only consumer use of the standard is completely wrong. I believe the remark about x264 being substantially something different than H.264 is also wrong -- as far as I know, x264 is an implementation of H.264. The topic of how the standard is used by consumers isn't avoided - it's just that the purpose of the article is to provide information about the standard itself, not to list a bunch of implementations, to discuss the role of big corporations in modern society, or to promote some kind of open source agenda. —Pawnbroker (talk) 18:16, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Chart on decoder

There is a chart on encoders, but not one on decoders. Can somebody start or add one. Decoders are of more interest to most people watching content. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.131.8.26 (talk) 23:07, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

All the variety is in the the encoders, the only place where decoders could differ would be decoding performance or platform support, not much scope there for a chart - Xedaf (talk) 21:43, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

That's actually not correct. Each "Profile" of the standard corresponds to a separate defined set of decoding features, as well as being a set of defined syntax that an encoder can use. See the chart of features supported for each Profile. In practice, there is also somewhat more variation in the decoding capabilities of various products than what is reflected in the profile/level structure that is specified in the standard. I suspect that the chart of encoder product capabilities is actually (at least partly) a chart of decoder capabilities. Pawnbroker (talk) 17:07, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

Infobox

There should be an info box about this codec to summarize it, and it should contain information about licensing and patents, so that this information as well as other things are available with a quick glance (the point of an infobox). Yfrwlf (talk) 20:07, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

Penetration or Market Share

It would be great if this page, and others about codecs, either linked to or contained some information about how widely used the codec is. It would help in trying to figure out what codec to use to preserve a video. Granted, there are other factors involved, but one way to avoid digirot (by which I mean loss of information due to unavailability of software to decode it) is to select a widely-used codec. Szetlan (talk) 02:50, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

Software encoder feature comparison - multithreads ?

I suggest adding a new row into the table "Software encoder feature comparison". That is whether the codec can run in multiple threads. In todays world (2009 januar) most consumer CPUs (desktop PCs) are multicore. --Xerces8 (talk) 22:02, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Streaming license

Is it true that they will be able to cash in from streaming websites starting 2011? I read this article but am none the wiser. --87.162.37.135 (talk) 16:02, 27 April 2009 (UTC)