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."

Comments

Good...progressive.

[NotoriousQ]

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?

Re:30" Display?

[hna]

I'm able to play most of the 720p's on my mac mini (G4 1.25GHz w/ 512M), there are however some small jerkiness in some scene changes.

1080p opens and the resolution is wider than what my monitor likes (1280x1024) and resizing to fit the screen helps a little, but not even close of being viewable. A couple of frames from here and there. Sound works fine though ;)

I think the faster mac mini will play the 720p's ok, but 1080p requires much more power...
Oh well, I didn't buy the computer to watch some trailers.

Couple x86-friends of mine tested these on their machines:
- 2200+ just barely played some of the ones with lower bitrate like the wildlife.
- a64 3000+ played 720p's with about 75% cpu load, and 1080p failed b/c mplayer (he thinks).

Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica

[Ilgaz]

I am tired of saying it and it will be last time..

Asking for money, from Mac users to play stuff fullscreen, especially after h264 is a great idea. :)

I better tell it that way...

Happy with Helix based Realplayer 10 for mac here. Yes, it plays h264 fullscreen, outperforms quicktime on fps too. It uses quicktime framework you know...

Just lets hope nobody will code a "quicktime 133t all key generator" trojan/malware. If it happens and becomes a scandal, look no place else than Apple. No, I don't need editing (!)

Re:John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica

[.com b4 .storm]

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

Hmm, well... I'm using QuickTime 7 on 10.3, and the QuickTime web site has a little bit that says... "Use QuickTime Player in Mac OS X Tiger or get QuickTime 7 for Panther to see for yourself. :)