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QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available
mmarlett writes "The long-anticipated release of Tiger has brought with it QuickTime 7, which was available on Thursday separately from Tiger, but not yet available for anything other than Mac OS X. That's to be expected, but as I was checking out the recent trailers for Batman Begins and Serenity, I realized that they (along with many other things) were also available as giant H.264 HD Quicktime files that require QuickTime 7. Makes me wish I had that 30" display."
Makes me wish I had a Mac fast enough to play the bloody things. See http://trailers.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/reco mmendations.html
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It's a shame, for they are GORGEOUS!
Well....given that I do not have quicktime7, nor does it seem that my linux libquicktime implementation handles this new modified quicktime format (or perhaps it has streaming problems?), I did not actually see the trailers.
For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.
However, due to description that the videos are 1280x768 (720p), I would like to thank the people at Apple who did not do the idiotic thing and run this at 1960x1080 (1040i) interlaced, which looks damn awful on most computer screens.
Also I would like to point out to the author of the article that one does not need a 30" cinema screen to see this in all its glory, as even my 10.4" laptop can handle 1280x768, and I have seen a 7.6" screen that handles the same resolution.
Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now. Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not? Why H.264 is such big news?
badness 10000
For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:
The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.
Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
So, who wants to encode the HD Serenity trailer into DivX or something and then send it to me? Please?
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
Here's a funny work around for G4's and the QTHD Theatre ... :-D While the movie is downloading, go into the A/V controls (cmd-k) and set the play speed to 1/2x -- In QT7, if the format permits, it will time stretch the audio instead of frequency stretch it.
:) The Audio will sound a little funny because of the time-stretch. It's a fun little experiment.
With the movie playing at half the speed, your G4 will be able to spit out more of the frames
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I've been ripping DVDs to it using D-Vision 3 and watching them with VLC
Im running 10.3.9 and downloaded QT7 and have been enjoying the HD videos. Ive had very few frame rate problems, it might help to set my processor to highest setting. The QT window has been changed slightly and the menu has been cleaned up more, but Apple really wants people to buy Pro and they leave the pro features greyed out in the menus so you can see what your missing out on. Ill buy Pro after I update to Tiger when I get back home from school.
Abandon all hope ye who enter here...
... can get QT7 codecs fast. I really don't like using QuickTime's players to play movies. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
seems to me its been turned into suckware. Slow to launch, fulla nags to upgrade, interface not as good as others, and installs Itunes too when you install it. (I do NOT want friggin Itunes!)
VLC is all I need, plays damned near anything, small footprint, no annoying features.
This space available.
I get half the frame rate (12 fps) on my 1 GHz PowerBook Titanium (133 MHz bus). It's pretty smooth for 12 fps. Interestingly, my 1.7 GHz Cube (100 MHz bus) is more jerky, despite the 700 MHz clock speed advantage.
Reports are that a 1.6 GHz G5 iMac has no problem with 720p24, and plays back 1080p24 at about 15 fps. A dual 1.8 GHz G5 is needed for 1080p24. (Apple recommends a 1.8 GHz G5 and a dual 2.0 GHz G5 respectively.)
To my surprise, one report also has it that a dual 1 GHz G4 will also play back 720p24 at the full 24 fps. A single 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook is close to being able to play back 720p24 @ 24 fps too.
Additional HD H.264 fps reports are listed in this table
Wouldn't the 23" be better? Since it matches the top HD resolution width (and 23" display height is a little greater), so that no scaling is necessary?
The 23" or any high quality display that can show 1,920 x 1,080 or slightly greater, is the ultimate for viewing HD content. The 30" is wasteful for this task alone and you would be torn between wanting to use the full screen and wanting the sharpest display without scaling.
PS, people spending big bucks on current big TV's are ignorant or crazy. Especially plasma displays. Plasma suffers severely from pixels becoming damaged from over use, the screens don't match HD, scale badly and look terrible to boot.
Mark my words, when big screen LCD or LED displays can natively display 1,920 x 1,080 without scaling, it will suddenly be a big marketting point which everyone will be talking about (because it has to be seen to be believed). Meanwhile, plasma manufacturers make a killing selling over priced garbage to Smith's that are trying to keep up with the Jones.
Do yourself a favour before buying a big screen or TV. View HD content on a good 1,920 x 1,080 display, then view it scaled up and down on a larger and smaller screen of equivalent quality and then realise the money people are wasting on displays which are "not yet there".
I am glad I am not the only one who felt this was pigware.
800mhz powerbook running 10.3.9
I try to watch a movie, I have to power off my system it freezes so hard.
just when I was bragging to all the windows people at work that my powerbook hasn't frozen in the 3 years I have had it.
I don't know about the rest of you but on my G4 733 with 1 GB of RAM and a Radeon 9000 Pro it is a joke.
.... with a few stops at 0.
I turned off all programs except Quicktime even turned off dashboard widgets (Running Tiger) and I sized the QT window to 1/2 native resolution and the informaiton window told me it was running between 3 and 9 FPS
DAMN that is insane.
haven't installed OS X 10.4 (Tiger) yet, and the new Quicktime update is causing some hiccups on systems running 10.3.9. here's a re-installer for Quicktime 6.5.2 for those of you need it.5 2reinstallerformac.html
http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/quicktime6
-- Boycott Shell
I know there are ways to get QT to go full screen (commands and such), but why doesn't QT 7 do it on its own yet?
I often times find myself annoyed by software that comes attached to operatings systems (read my review of Mac OS X 10.4 to see why Safari 2.0 is really raising my ire). The most recent culprit is Quicktime 7.
I happen to be one of many people who shelled out the necessary bones for the Pro version of Quicktime 6. So what does apple do to us loyal customers when we upgrade our operating system? Poof, no more Quicktime Pro.
But wait a sec, what if I was satisfied with Quicktime 6? What if the features of having the Pro version outweight the features of upgrading to 7 (which they certainly do for my purposes)? It would seem that Apple is not concerned with any of this.
At some point, I'll probably shell out again for Quicktime 7 Pro, but I would really prefer to make this choice myself.
You can read the permanent version of this post here.
Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that he himself cou
This strikes me as an extremely obnoxious thing for Apple to have done. It seems to me that anything that shows up in "Software Update" should be just that: an update that will fix bugs and add new functionality, rather than replace your paid version of the software with the crippled free version of the next major release.
I played the Serenity trailer on a Dual 2.7ghz G5 connected to a 30" LCD at the Apple Store.
Wow. Holy Crap. Un-frickin'-believable!
Pausing looks like a photo. Probably the most noticeable place where the resolution shines through is the closing credits. The letters are totally sharp with absolutely no aliasing/halos at the edges, as is typical to other decoders/formats/resolutions.
On the HD Gallery website it does indicate that you require at least a G5 to play back H.264 content although I have heard reports that it can run on the highest end G4's.
1.42GHz G4 with 1GB of RAM, but a way slow disk (aka Mac Mini) only dropped to 12 fps, probably about 30-40% of the time. It ran 24 fps about 15-20% of the time. That was the 1280x544 version. Firefox and Terminal were up, but idle. Still on 10.3.9. I'll try it again with Tiger when it is delivered this week.
QuickTime 7 seems to break the AppleScript full screen hacks floating about the internet. Does anyone know of an AppleScript that restores this functionality for QT 7?