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

30" Display?

[darkov]

Makes me wish I had a Mac fast enough to play the bloody things. See http://trailers.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/reco mmendations.html

fp?

Re:30" Display?

[stereotree]

Here are the stats from that page on what you need for HD to run smoothly thru Quicktime 7: (NOTE that you pretty much need a G5)

Recommended Hardware Configurations for H.264 High Definition (HD) Playback

To play high definition video, a large amount of data must be processed by your computer. A powerful system will deliver the best playback experience.

For 1280x720 (720p) video at 24-30 frames per second:

* 1.8 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer

* At least 256 MB of RAM

* 64 MB or greater video card

For 1920x1080 (1080p) video at 24-30 frames per second:

* Dual 2.0 GHz PowerMac G5 or faster Macintosh computer

* At least 512 MB of RAM

* 128 MB or greater video card

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).

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:Good...progressive.

[dr.badass]

For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.

QuickTime is a container format, that can, er contain many different codecs. In this case, the codec in question is H.264, which is currently only available in QuickTime 7. Same format, new codec.

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.

ffmpeg might have had H.264 decoding support for a while, but definitely not " a few years", and encoding is till pretty fresh. As in : BIG FAT WARNING: x264 is still in early development stage. (Also, many of the other existing H.264 implementations don't follow the spec, and do stupid things like use AVI containers.)

Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not?

A little of both, with a dose of marketing. QuickTime was showing it's age -- QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 implementation was a joke, mostly because of assumptions made with QuickTime 1 that no longer hold true.

The marketing comes in when you consider that the installed base of QuickTime users is more likely to upgrade if you go on about HD and pristine quality and fast downloads than APIs and architectures. It's a lot easier to get people to upgrade when you have a carrot to dangle in front of them.

Why H.264 is such big news?

The news is that it is now supported natively by a popular content creation platform, with an installed content delivery platform that is (IIRC), second only to Flash. This means that you can create H.264 content and have the reasonable expectation that people will be able to view it.

Re:Good...progressive.

[dr.badass]

The number of people viewing avi's and wmv's are much larger than the number of people who are ready to view qt's.

True, of course. I guess I blocked WMV from my mind because it isn't suitable for my own stuff. As for Real vs. QuickTime, I recall seeing numbers that put them very, very, close -- and as a creator, I would choose QT over Real any day -- I don't think I'm alone in that. In any event, the point was that QT7/H.264 is news because it's gone mainstream.

Also I am beginning to doubt my own understanding of MPEG-4.

It doesn't help that MPEG-4 is utterly bewildering.

So is quicktime7 a new format or not? ... Quicktime7 is the same old qt format, but the program now has a better MPEG-4 stream handling plus an AVC handler?

My understanding is that it is the same .mov container as before. What has changed is QuickTime-the-software, which has been significantly upgraded. In other words, the file format was capable of things the software was not.

But then in that case if they had released these trailers before qt7, the only people who would not be able to play them are the people with Quicktime players, while people with mplayer will have had no problems.

Not quite. It's more confusing than that. Players don't always support every format in every container that they support. mplayer might support .mov, and it might support H.264, but it might not support H.264 inside .mov (this example might not be true, but such things do happen). The standard specifies only two container formats: .mp4 (based on QT), and .mpg (MPEG-2/DVD style muxed streams), so it's entirely possible that there's some limitation or difference in mplayer, et al.'s .MOV support that makes it not work. Likewise, Apple may use some part or "profile" of AVC that isn't supported by mplayer yet.

So, my conclusion there is "Maybe. MPEG-4 is confusing. My head hurts."

I've read elsewhere of people using H.264 video + MP3 audio inside AVI containers, which is so incredibly non-standard that it makes me dizzy.

John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica

[babbage]

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:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

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.

Be careful if you have QT Pro!

[harlows_monkeys]

When QT7 shows up in "Software Update", be careful if you have QT6 Pro. If you let it update, you will now have QT7 non-Pro. QT7 replaces QT6, and QT6 license keys do not work with QT7.

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.