QuickTime 7 Windows Preview Available

Tenken writes "Looks like Apple has finally made available a PC version of QuickTime 7. It seems to perform on par with the Mac release, though the H.264 decoding for hi-def trailers will probably see much more optimization before QT is officially released. The main reason to upgrade is to check out the new hi-def trailers which you can find at the QuickTime site. There are 480p and 720p versions available for the few hi-def trailers, though I'm fairly certain there were also 1080p clips online a few weeks ago."

Comments

Annonunced this morning

[Space cowboy]

... along with the podcasting updates that'll make iTunes even more popular, but for some reason things like this were skipped over :-)

Simon.

1080p Trailers

[caperry]

There were 1090p trailers, but it takes a LOT of hardware to decode them (I couldn't get full framerate on a Dual G5 box at the apple store) and I'm sure the Windows version can't do them at all yet - hence the removal.

Re:1080p Trailers

[fm6]

I couldn't get full framerate on a Dual G5 box at the apple store

I'm no expert on video decoding, but isn't the generalized power of your main processors matters a lot less than the specialized processing power built into your video adapter card?

Re:1080p Trailers

[uiucmatse]

There are two 1080p trailers right there on the page: Serenity and Batman Begins. Although, as the parent said, you need some high-end power to play 'em well. I've got a 2.0 GHz G5 iMac, and I'm getting about 13 frames per second.

Re:1080p Trailers

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Set:

System Preferences -> Energy Saver -> Options -> Processor Performance. Select "highest".

I get full framerate on Serentity and Batman Returns trailer on a dual 2.5, w/ the ATI 9600.

Re:1080p Trailers

[TylerL82]

Were you by chance viewing the 1080p trailers on a 30" Cinema Display? Try the same video on a G5 with a 23" display attached.

I've seen (and tried to fix) poor HD performance on retail store Dual 2.7GHz G5s with 30" ACDs.
1080p screws up somewhere along the video pipeline (drivers, video card, duallink DVI) for the 30" display...but a slower PowerMac hooked up to a 23" display plays 1080p smooth as silk. What's the holdup?

Re:1080p Trailers

[NEOtaku17]

That's funny my Athlon 2100+ with 512MB or DDR PC2700 can play HD trailors just fine. But then again it does have a nVidia 6800(NU unlocked to 16 pipelines and an extra vertex shader). Perhaps it has less to do with the main CPU and more to do with video card eh?

Re:1080p Trailers

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a problem with the OS X scheduler. Fortunately they are moving to the superior Intel ACPI system and won't have these problems.

Re:1080p Trailers

[Tenken]

I think its just a typo on the Quicktime page, all that's available is 480p and 720p when I view the Serenity and Batman HD pages.

Re:1080p Trailers

[dFaust]

Actually, the beauty of H.264 is that is DOESN'T take alot of hardware to decode them. Our macs at work are dual 1.25ghz G4s with some ancient ATI video card and could playback the 1080p trailers full size with ease. We were all amazed.

On the flipside, my Athlon 2200xp at work couldn't come CLOSE to playing a 720p trailer at full speed :(

Re:1080p Trailers

[KillShill]

new and existing video cards can decode them in hw if those lazy bums get to releasing the software necessary.

Re:1080p Trailers

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Most all decoding is done in software/CPU and that's where the problem is, not in the raw display of the images.

ATI were talking about building a hardware decoder for H.264 into their future cards but it's not there yet.

Re:1080p Trailers

[Mike Peel]

Serenity trailer, available in 480p, 720p and 1080p to stream, or 1080p to download.

Batman trailer, also available in 480p, 720p and 1080p to stream.

And, Apple's HD Gallery. Includes the above trailers, plus a few other 1080p and 720p short films.

Re:1080p Trailers

[damsa]

I think it's more to do with CPU and how good the Athlon is and bad Quicktime player is.

My friend had a piece of shit AthlonXp laptop 2100+ with a integrated vid card that played HD video smoothly. However on a iMac G5 2.0 Ghz. It struggled. It helped when moved from Quicktime player to VLC.

Supposedly, Tiger is supposed to use the graphics card to offload some of the quicktime stuff so I suppose the graphics card may help somewhat.

Re:1080p Trailers

[sweetooth]

No, they are there unless you are browsing with windows... from the pages code.


if (browser.isWin) {document.write('.q1080 {display: none}');}

Re:1080p Trailers

[Lussarn]

This probably says more about Apples in(ability) to code for x86 than the speed of the cpu. Something they will have to learn pretty soon I heard.

Re:1080p Trailers

[larkost]

Not in this case. The hardware to decode H.264 has not made it into video cards yet, although there have been a few announcements that it will. For the moment the decode part of this is completely software based.

Oh... and hardware based solutions often have severe restrictions (only at certain sizes, etc).

Re:1080p Trailers

[Anonymous Coward]

what the fuck? I ran the batman 1080 trailer fine on my dad's G4 867MHz a few weeks back.

Re:Announced this morning

[Space cowboy]

Gaah.... s/on/o/ fabitch

Preview, not Submit. Preview, not Submit...

mplayer

[TRS-80]

mplayer (even on win32) plays the HD trailers fine already, no need to download Quicktime.

Re:mplayer

[KillShill]

heh and to think, i installed the preview for nothing.

thanks for the heads up.

Re:mplayer

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Reportedly, recent builds of VLC play them just fine too.

720p/1080p trailers are there.

[applegoddess]

you just missed the link. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/ is the link to the 720p/1080p trailers :)

Re:720p/1080p trailers are there.

[Tenken]

Ah I should have included that link instead ;) Anyway that link is still missing the 1080p versions, I know because I downloaded a 1080p Serenity trailer when the site was first put up a few weeks ago. Now all that's available is the 480p and 720p.

Then again, it's not like even my 3Ghz P4 can effectively decode the 1080p trailer. Guess I'll just have to wait for the H.264 hardware decoding from ATI ;)

Re:720p/1080p trailers are there.

[Anonymous Coward]

i see the 1080p trailers on http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/serenity. html and if http://images.apple.com/movies/us/hd_gallery/gl180 0/serenity_1080p.zip isnt the serenity trailer in 1080p, i don't know what it is.

Re:720p/1080p trailers are there.

[euphonaesthesia]

The links to the 1080p trailers were showing up for me shortly after I installed the preview. Apple probably discovered that the PCs weren't handling the 1080p files very well and removed them for Windows users with QT7 installed.

Re:720p/1080p trailers are there.

[Anonymous Coward]

can you read? like the comments right above?

a quick idea whose time has come

[Leontes]

I know this has been mentioned before, but I think it merits further emphasis. Quicktime pro being a payable extra is patently ridiculous. All of the elements of tiger work flawlessly together, but quicktime pro, something that makes things a lot easier as well as nicer (I mean, full screen, that's an extra?) is a lot to ask a computer user. I cannot imagine the revenue retained by apple by maintain quicktime pro is very much; and the good karma earned by making it available to everyone would be beneficial. It made sense a few years ago, perhaps, but now everyone should expect the things that are included to be with pro to be inherent in the basic version. As long as it remains an add on, on either platform, the longer it feels like one piece of the apple puzzle that just doesn't fit. It's like apple is big and shiny but there is one huge bite out of it. But not in an aesthetically pleasing, oh this is a nice logo way. Please, apple, make the pro version standard. Why is it so different from everything else on the system?

Re:a quick idea whose time has come

[el_womble]

Despite being on the forefront of the technology to drive video on the home pc (iDVD, iMovie, H.264) I can understand why Apple might consider full screen a pro extra. There shouldn't be any content. There is no legal way of ripping a DVD (DMCA was designed for this purpose) or downloading TV in the states, and the only downloadable PPV content is porn. At a push there are trailers, but traditionally they've been such low quality that fullscreen would have been a joke. So who buys the full screen QT7 upgrade?

Pros, pirates and perverts. (Wow I can alliterate - even if I can't speel (sic))

All three of these markets are fair game. Its low blow - and undoubtedly unpopulour. But outside of these markets, I expect you'll find few who actually 'need' the feature and would rather pocket the extra £20.

Re:a quick idea whose time has come

[Leontes]

Any content that one would want to watch benefits from being watched full screen. Fan films, advertisements, home movies, mobile video phone clips (even though cruddy quality) as well as everything else sometimes looks pleasant full screen, when one doesn't want any other distractions, when one doesn't want be reminded that I'm watching this video on a computer. No one besides "pirates, pros and perverts" needs this feature the same way no one needs a internet browser, but being able to access the internet is something we should expect from our computers, just like being able to watch content without distraction.

Re:a quick idea whose time has come

[aclarke]

Yeah, no kidding. I actually PAID for Quicktime 6 a few months before 7 came out. Of course, my key for 6 doesn't work with the new version. What a waste of money.

So now I have to say, VLC is the way to go. The only thing I can't do (and want to do) with VLC that I could do with Quicktime Pro is chop bits out of my videos that I don't want. And that's not worth another $30 to me.

Re:a quick idea whose time has come

[Anonymous Coward]

serials.ws

Now if it only supported playlists,

[b00m3rang]

or full screen mode. Maybe it's the crippled bitch that is the free version, but I'd rather use Real player than Quicktime (and that's saying something). Personally, I'm a fan of Kplayer... but WiMP will do in a pinch. Is there any decent player for Windows that will skip to the next file instead of crashing if it encounters problems with playback?

Re:Now if it only supported playlists,

[Anonymous Coward]

I download movies first and play them later. Quicktime lets me do that (most of the time) but Realplayer doesn't let me (and keeps trying to connect). I realize both Quicktime and Realplayer work with fast, reliable connections, but Quicktime *also* works for the rest of us.

Looks like NO 1080i for Windows (Yet)

[TheGuano]

Apple seems to have disabled the 1080i links for the x86 version of QT. They're controlling what version can be shown through quicktime directly on the movies page: Right-click the 480p or 720p tabs on the movie page and you'll see they're quicktime controls (complete with grayed out teaser links to entice you to update to Pro so you can same the movies to hard drive)

I bet you can copy the file from a Mac and try to play it though - might need a dual dual-core Opteron though? ;)

Re:Looks like NO 1080i for Windows (Yet)

[Lally Singh]

How much you wanna bet that they're doing this temporarily to prevent a _massive_ akamai bill from all those windows users downloading qt 7?

Re:Looks like NO 1080i for Windows (Yet)

[TheGuano]

Since the 720p version is already over 100MB, I wouldn't be surprised. However, from another pragmatic standpoint, the performance on 720p for WinQT7 is so poor that I'm not surprised they disabled 1080p for now.

Some people are saying that they're getting full-speed rendering under mplayer, so it sounds like it's QT that's at fault. In fact, the performance is so poor that I don't even think true Mac zealots would buy the whole "superiority of PowerPC" argument completely.

12-14fps on P-M 1.8GHz

[TheGuano]

on the 720p Batban Begins. Doesn't go under 10fps, doesn't go over 17fps. Shrinking the window doesn't help and might even slow things down, so the bottleneck is not drawing the decoded scene to screen.

It does look a lot crisper than those WMV-HD Imax clips up at Microsoft's site. But I'm able to play those at full speed, even the 1080 ones. So there could be some major tweaking left to do.

Re:12-14fps on P-M 1.8GHz

[TRS-80]

That's odd, I can play it fullscreen (on a 1280x768 display) at full speed with about 70-80% CPU usage, using mplayer for win32 on a p-m 1.7ghz. Quicktime's win32 interface must suck or something.

Re:12-14fps on P-M 1.8GHz

[TheGuano]

Mplayer? Are you talking about the Microsoft WMVHD clips? I can play those full-screen, full-speed as well.

I don't know if it's the encoding process or the source quality, but the H.264 files seem much, much more crisp at a pixel level.

Re:12-14fps on P-M 1.8GHz

[Anonymous Coward]

mplayer, not Windows Media Player.

Re:12-14fps on P-M 1.8GHz

[TRS-80]

I'm talking about the Batman Begins and Serenity H.264 720p trailers from apple's website, played with mplayer (the OSS one, not any of the windows media player variants). I haven't actually looked at any of the MS WMVHD clips.

They are very crisp, to the extent I think I'm seeing film grain on the Serenity trailer or something.

Re:12-14fps on P-M 1.8GHz

[TheGuano]

I just tried mplayer, it's indeed smoother. It looks like by default it uses the FFmpeg h.264 decoder.

Now, there are some noticealbe differences in quality between this and the apple decoder. If you view the Fantastic 4 720p trailer, using mplayer it has a smooth framerate, but when you see the "Marvel" logo come into frame, the red gradient fade around the lettering isn't smooth, the color transition is mottled, almost as if it were in 16-bit color. On QT7 it's smooth. The difference is really hard to notice most of the time, especially with lots of motion on-screen but it's there and probably accounts for a lot of the speed discrepency.

I'll take the mplayer version running 24fps anyday, but hopefully Apple gets their act together with quicktime and gets at least 720p running full-rate on a 1.6-1.8ghz CPU.

Also, while sleuthing it became clear that the 1080p trailers are all still visible in the page source for each movie, it's just not displayed for Windows, but you can hit the direct link and download it anyways :/

Lisencing Issues!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows should eventually play hi-def videos in quicktime better than mac. Apple doesn't pay the lisence for it or something. Basically, Apple computers have to offload all the processing to the processor(s) while PC's are "allowed" to use the video card. Or something along those lines. Please, somebody, help me out on the specifics....

Preview and write

[Anonymous Coward]

As Apple users, regardless of platform, voice your opinion and write to Apple. The preview is there for a reason, I suppose the term beta is so 90s. Get out and get Apple to fix the bugs and request features.

More videos found in the HD gallery!

[Fulkkari]

For more HD videos to watch, go to the HD gallery. They are awesome.

Mmm... QTTask.exe

[Dancin_Santa]

Hey Apple! Get rid of QTTask.exe and anything else that tries to quietly install itself without permission.

It was awfully clever of you to have QTTask.exe re-spawn after deletion. But don't do it again.

Re:Mmm... QTTask.exe

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that's annoying? Check out if the Windows version of QT7 has its own cache with an altered form of the cached files - you can no longer just copy and rename the cached files on a Mac to save them. I suspect a similar situation with the Windows version.

Now you have to go to the trouble of using tcpdump and finding the actual server the file is coming from before downloading it directly - a major pain (and one I haven't bothered to try yet).

Quicktime 7 sucks.

Re:Mmm... QTTask.exe

[Fulkkari]

Or alternatively you should just get QuickTime Pro. IMHO it should however be part of the core system or iLife. What you described was actually not the craziest thing about QuickTime. What's even crazier is that you have to get Pro version of QuickTime in order to watch fullscreen movies (unless you use a hack like I do). But other than that, QuickTime is quite okay.

Re:Mmm... QTTask.exe

[justforaday]

Pssst. Try disabling the Quicktime system tray icon in the Quicktime prefs. That will get rid of qttask for you. It's amazing how many people get upset when their bruteforce methods don't work, yet the program does exactly what it's supposed to when asked nicely...

Re:Mmm... QTTask.exe

[Anonymous Coward]

How about having a "Would you like to add a QT quicklaunch icon to the task tray?" dialog in the setup?

I guess as a Mac user, you're probably too used to having decisions made for you by the benevolent dictator.

It's definately a preview

[atezun]

This software is definately a preview. I tried to watch the keynote on it from WWDC. The picture was slow as hell(Took steve fifteen minutes to get on stage) and the audio feed was talking about intel processors. Man, somebody sure messed up that feed.

In related news

[deep2k]

X264 has just enabled High-Profile encoding. See http://www.doom9.org/ for more information. I mention this 'cause the main drawcard of QT7 seems to be AVC/H.264.

I have already tried it...

[Anonymous Coward]

.. on my x86 mac and it definitely feels much snappier!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion