Filed under: Video, Apple, Apple TV
YouTube on Apple TV to use H.264
I thought it was a little odd that the Apple press release concerning the YouTube addition to Apple TV stated that it would take weeks for all YouTube content to be made available on the Apple TV. iLounge got to the bottom of this slightly odd situation (or so it seemed without explanation). They spoke with Apple Vice President of Worldwide Mac Hardware Marketing David Moody who explained the delay. It would seem that all YouTube's videos are in the process of being converted to H.264, a codec that Apple TV supports. All new videos will be converted to H.264 as they are uploaded, but it will take some time to convert the back catalog.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
bradah said 9:10PM on 5-30-2007
When Apple and Google formed their partnership, I brought up the issue of Apple possibly even courting YouTube. I was then blasted for even suggesting that Apple would sink this low. No one agreed with me......
"So sweet it is...... "
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Halopend@gmail.com said 9:08PM on 5-30-2007
Um, so rather than just make Quicktime flash video compatible, which perian does, they reconvert and store all the videos on youtube? Am I the only who thinks that's ridiculous?
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JeffDM said 9:14PM on 5-30-2007
It might not mean a re-conversion, from flash to 264. It could mean that they are making 264 files from the original submission. I hope it's that, then there are opportunities for better video that way because YouTube had been using an older flash codec for some time now.
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Timothy said 9:20PM on 5-30-2007
#1,
You're a moron. They are clearly re-encoding from the source material originally uploaded, and not from the compressed flash version you see on youtube.com
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Eleventeen said 9:25PM on 5-30-2007
It'd be nice if you could get the 264 version when you went to the website instead of the craptacular flash version (from normal surfing I mean, not just for Apple TV.)
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G said 9:25PM on 5-30-2007
"Clearly?" How do you know this? Cite a reference before calling someone else a "moron," please. What are you, ten years old?
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msr said 11:04PM on 5-30-2007
Oh, that's awesome! I assume this means we won't have to deal with flash video anymore, right? That's great for Apple too, because H.264 requires QuickTime, right?
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Macskeeball said 12:16AM on 5-31-2007
@msr (#7), no it doesn't require QuickTime.
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devon said 7:33AM on 5-31-2007
Think Big Picture here. Most people upload decent quality video but then the files are converted and compress that it looks like crap. Now the video will still look good even after conversion to H.264. You tube & Apple would love to have quality videos to show online & on Apple TV captured from HD Video or DV cameras, but when you can't have your big clunky camera with you, Apple is betting you will have your iPhone that can capture video and possibly upload direct to YouTube while on the go. Even if the capturing video is not in the iPhone cards for now, we can still watch YouTube on the go. Apple is crating a "infinite" loop for consuming and "producing" content. H.264, YouTube & Apple TV is part 1. iPhone capturing video & YouTube widget is a possible part 2.
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V-Twin said 2:40AM on 5-31-2007
Here's what Jobs had to say a few months ago about YouTube on the iPhone:
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from: http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/ultimate-iphone-faqs-list-part-2/
Markoff: “What about YouTube–”
Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”
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Well it looks like this is exactly what they're doing with the AppleTV...
To me it pretty much confirms that a custom .h264 YouTube player will be added to the iPhone, and possibly at launch...
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Sven said 2:50AM on 5-31-2007
Isn't YouTube so successful because they used a video format that would run on most of the computers? More than 90 % of all users had already falsh installed when YouTube started. But check the statistics, how many are willing to upgrade their computers? In larger companies only the sys admins will do that. So, install QuickTime just to watch YouTube videos on Windows. Plus: You cannot just download Flash movies, but if they're played in a QT container, basically anyone with a QT Pro can (yeah, I know, there are ways to get the Flash videos with Safari and other software...)
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running said 4:41AM on 5-31-2007
well, it will maybe be h.264, but it wil STILL BE flash video!
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KirbyMeister said 5:38AM on 5-31-2007
This is just plain stupid. Re-encoding to h264 will not make it look any better. YouTube doesn't store the regular, good-quality versions after it's done encoding them to h264. Jobs just doesn't want to support anything other than the blessed QuickTime format.
Which also means one thing: they're going to be pulling these videos on a selective basis. As in, Youtube on Apple TV is a walled garden. Every video accessible from there will have been selected and screened by Apple - none of the random Japanese cartoon openings, or TV shows - hell, unless the lawyers are smart, this will include "fair use" parodies such as YGO Abridged and that copyright explaination involving Disney movies. Nope, can't have that. In short, they're going to filter the hell out of it.
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neckaros said 6:08AM on 5-31-2007
KirbyMeiste > According to this news every new video uploaded will be converted automaticly. So no intervention from apple here. I don't think it would be clever to hire someone just to select youtube videos
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ThunkDifferent.com said 9:28AM on 5-31-2007
Even if flash video is pushed through the h264 format, won't the quality on a HDTV be sorely lacking? has anyone heard of a higher quality measure taken by the video giant? It would be nice to know they are supporting high quality Quicktime uploads for high quality playback.
http://ThunkDifferent.com
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itsasony said 10:01AM on 5-31-2007
H.264 is much bigger than Apple, FYI for those of you who get-off whining about Apple. One could say YOU were fooled to think it was their idea, how did that happen?
"ITU is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and its membership includes 191 Member States and more than 700 Sector Members and Associates." (1)
the codec (H.264), scheduled for completion in spring 2003, is a product of the Joint Video Team (JVT) of the International Telecommunication Union and International Standards Organization (2)
"Scalable video coding (SVC) has been a research topic for more than 20 years... The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) started a new work item on scalable video coding (SVC) with the title “Ad Hoc Group on Exploration of Interframe Wavelet Technology in Video Coding” in December 2001. In October 2003, MPEG issued a “Call for Proposals on Scalable Video Coding Technology”. 14 submitted technical proposals were evaluated in March 2004, among them were 12 wavelet-based proposals and 2 proposals were extensions of H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC, one of them was contributed by the image communication group of the HHI. After further subjective tests for different scalability scenarios in June 2004 and October 2004 that verified the superior coding efficiency of the HHI solution in comparison to all other submitted proposals, MPEG has chosen the HHI proposal as a starting point of its SVC standardization project in October 2004. In January 2005, MPEG and the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of the ITU-T agreed to jointly finalize the SVC project as an Amendment of their H.264 / MPEG-4 AVC standard, and the scalable coding scheme developed by the image communication group of the HHI was selected as the first Working Draft (WD-1)." (3)
"The primary source of licenses for patents applying to this standard is a private organization known as MPEG LA (which is not affiliated in any way with the MPEG standardization organization, but which also administers patent pools for MPEG-2 Part 1 Systems, MPEG-2 Part 2 Video, MPEG-4 Part 2 Video, and other technologies). In January 2007, a U.S. District court jury gave an advisory opinion that one patent owned by Qualcomm should be invalidated. Qualcomm had claimed that the patent had been incorporated in H.264 in violation of its patent. The U.S. District Court judge has yet to rule on the verdict." (4)
(1) http://www.itu.int/net/home/index.aspx
(2) http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020920S0049
(3) http://ip.hhi.de/imagecom_G1/savce/index.htm
(4) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264
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Donkey said 6:02PM on 5-31-2007
Re: #16
Though h.264 is a standard much larger than Apple, we may have to blame poorly informed news sites for proclaiming it an Apple-created standard. They often confuse it with the general mpeg4 file format, which is BASED on Quicktime.
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Leonard Nimrod said 5:07PM on 6-01-2007
YOU DON'T NEED QUICKTIME FOR H.264. FLASH CAN ENCAPSULATE AND STREAM H.264. IT'S AN OPEN STANDARD.
I'm glad Google has decided to up their codec quality. More work on processors but less higher quality of compressed streams. Bandwidth is still the biggest bottleneck.
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HankG said 2:44AM on 6-02-2007
Flash Video an open standard? Ha! Not, it's a very basic proprietary media container from Adobe. And it doesn't support H.264. FLV supports H.263 (used by YouTube) and the proprietary ON2 VP6 codec.
ON2 VP6 and H.264 offer about the same quality, I encoded some HD videos with both, and H.264 looks a bit better, but also takes longer encoding.
Now, for Apple to persuade YouTube to use H.264 is exciting and stupid too. It's much more effective to build FLV, DivX and WMV support in the AppleTV and open it up so everyone can offer their content to it, through RSS feeds and RSS directories for instance. It will boost sales!
But apparently Apple has a long term strategy with H.264 / QuickTime. iPod and iTunes boost rollout of QuickTime on many desktops. And Flash penetration for video isn't 90%, since video requires Flash 8 or higher, which means an installed base of circa 65%. Similar to Windows Media Player 9 or higher. iTunes (and QuickTime) are third with circa 55% and rising fast. RealPlayer has lost the game.
It's time that H.264 gets its share on the Internet since it is a great standard. I doubt the YouTube.com webportal will switch to H.264. IMHO YouTube will still offer basic FLV videos on their website, and offers H.264 exclusively for AppleTV.
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