Apple: we have seen the future, and it is H.264
You won’t find it on the periodic table, but soon
enough you may just find it everywhere else. It’s
not every day one gets excited about a video codec, but H.264 is just such a codec. It is waiting, or rather eagerly
panting, at the sidelines to take over from the current MPEG-2 video standard.
The H.264 standard has already been adopted by over 120 companies, including Motorola, Intel, British Telecom, Samsung
and DirecTV. There are over 200 products currently in development before the codec has even shipped in any significant
volume. Why? It can deliver DVD quality video at half the data rate. It also has the ability to scale quite gracefully
from limited bandwidth apps such as 3G cell phones all the way up to HD video streams, the mother of
bandwidth-hogs.
H.264 will be making a big splash when it rolls out in Tiger later this year. It will be an integral part of
applications such as Quicktime 7, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, QuickTime-based third-party applications. Confidence in
H.264’s wide adoption comes from the fact that it is an industry standard, and not any one company’s proprietary
technology. Said Frank Casanova, Apple’s director of QuickTime marketing, “Windows Media, while good looking, is not a
standard and it’s just not going to play a role in this space… we are not trying to compete with the standard the way
Microsoft is.”
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Oliver said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
If the world had already decided on H.264 then Frank wouldn't feel the need to talk it up like this before it's even released. The fact of the matter is that this battle is far from being settled. Remember, 5% of PeeCees are shipped with windows media player (ok that will be less thanks to the EU - and no thanks to DoJ). M$ is also making inroads into people's living rooms with windows media PeeCees, not to mention the deals they are setting (have set) up with various US cable TV providers. There's a lot of support for going the MPEG way, but lets not be fooled into thinking we've seen the last of Windows Media.
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Oliver said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
correction: 95%
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holophile said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
When you consider "in terms of broadcast, H.264 has already been adopted by Europes DVB, the top 6 Japanese broadcasters, and is under final consideration in the USs ATSC. The ITU-T has chosen H.264 for its H.241 videoconferencing specification. And in the mobile arena, H.264 has been adopted by the 3GPP (for GSM) organization and is under final consideration with the 3GPP2 (for CDMA2000) organization." I think the world HAS already decided.
[source: http://www.apple.com/mpeg4/h264faq.html]
Frank feels the need to talk it up for two reasons. First, Apple has spent a lot of money in R&D on JOINT development of this codec. And second, but probably more important to the Tiger release, it will be the first OS to support it. And I don't mean just having an application that supports it. ANY application on the OS will be able to take advantage of it.
95% of PeeCees may be shipped with Windows Media Player, but if "we have distributed over 300 million copies of QuickTime 6 and we distribute 400,000 copies a day", I'd say it's approaching a pretty equal marketshare. Besides, the majority of people prefer to watch video on their TVs and their DVD players. The fact that they are making "inroads" on media centers or making deals on the infrastructure side, may help them get a head start or even gain a foothold but there are many more problems they face over an openly developed codec.
For one, licensing. Almost a dozen separate companies have staken claim to the use of their patents in Microsoft's WM9/VC9 codec. And "since Microsoft has never acknowledged any other technology suppliers in its literature on VC 9, it is unlikely that it is currently paying royalties on its current distribution. But it will need to. MPEG 2 for instance has a flat rate royalty of $2.50 on each copy, while MPEG 4/H.264 is free up to 100,000 units, then costs 20 cents per unit, falling to 10 cents a unit, capped at $3.5m per year, rising with inflation."
[source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/01/24/ms_codec_patents/]
Lastly, Windows Media is not simply a codec. The lure of paying to use it over an open standard is that it would be paired with Microsoft's DRM protection. But apparently, not even the WM10 DRM can be hacked. I don't think that would give a lot of distributors confidence.
[source: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000900029916/]
I don't mean to come off sounding like a zealot, I'm just trying to convey the facts behind the issue.
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holophile said 4:14PM on 6-16-2005
[correction]
But apparently even the WM10 DRM can be hacked.
don't know how that "not" got in there.
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