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165 Comments
- neoform, on 10/11/2007, -8/+146Or.. it could be that flash is proprietary and H.264 isn't..... ?
- patch, on 10/11/2007, -4/+117It is probably a quality issue. H.264 encoded videos require a much smaller file size to get a quality image because it also relies on a lot of machine power to decode it. The initial batch obviously won't be better quality if they just transcode it, but once they start taking from the original source things may get more exciting. And lets face it, youtube has to step up its quality eventually.
- Sandwiches_Time, on 10/11/2007, -2/+83Jobs said that they would be doing this back in January to the New York Times and David Pogue. I never thought YouTube would actually do it, though:
Markoff: “Flash?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”
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.”
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/13/ultimate-iphone-faqs-list-part-2/ - TheSolomon, on 10/11/2007, -4/+55"I think Apple really wants to spread their "codec" to the common folks."
H.264 is not Apple's codec. It was developed as a joint venture between 'ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group' and 'ISO/IEC Moving Picture Experts Group.' (Just like AAC is actually MPEG-2:7/MPEG-4:3.)
Contrary to what some may say, Apple frequently adopts industry standards. H.264 is an industry standard, and a much better choice for displaying video over a proprietary format like Flash. (Why on earth would you choose Flash, with all its non-video-related bloat, when all you want to do is display video?)
Apple wants to use a video format to display video? How dare they?! ;-) - normalkid, on 10/11/2007, -7/+50this must have to do with Youtube distribution on the iPhone / iPod. Why else are they going to the trouble of reencoding all their (millions?) of videos into another format. Apple could have easily written a flash player for the Apple TV.
- TheSolomon, on 10/11/2007, -1/+32This is not a Quicktime issue. Please don't confuse things.
H.264 wasn't created by Apple, it was created by two companies unrelated to Apple (VCEG and MPEG, see my earlier comment above).
H.264 is an industry standard for video. Flash is a proprietary format. Which seems like the better choice to integrate into devices for display of video? - PixelVision, on 10/11/2007, -1/+30The Gap?
- MagnetoWasRight, on 10/11/2007, -4/+30You don't need Quicktime for H.264. It's an open standard. Retard.
- chris9902, on 10/11/2007, -3/+25it'll be like 2006 all over again.
- darkhero, on 10/11/2007, -5/+26I heard ever since they were taken over by Google. They started converting there video to H.264. Which do you think is going to last longer FLV or H.264. 10 years from now. People will be saying what the ***** is FLV. I personally hate it. The quality of H.264 is amazing. Also Joost uses it. Everyone has Quicktime.
- hendzen, on 10/11/2007, -1/+20It'd be nice if everyone could access the h.264 youtube, maybe this is a precursor to a quality upgrade. If h.264 is used commonly for web streaming, maybe next-gen mobo's could feature a dedicated h.264 chip like the Apple TV.
- TheSolomon, on 10/11/2007, -3/+19"quicktime is a bucket of ***** program"
Apple did not create H.264. Quicktime has almost nothing to do with H.264, other than it being an application that supports it.
Please educate yourself, paying close attention to the very first sentence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264 - etandrib, on 10/11/2007, -2/+18Yep and I'm not just talking about resolution either… I want QUALITY videos.
- inactive, on 10/11/2007, -1/+16This is very clever and forward thinking of the YouTube folks.
H.264 is an open standard. Correct me if I am wrong, but Flash is not.
I think YouTube will take this opportunity to store larger originals, probably for a huge upgrade down the road. Perhaps the largest complaint about YouTube is video quality.
They might also continue to support and transcode video to the Flash format for PC video playback, however since the source files will be in the more streaming suitable H.264 format, it lends them more options for getting their content on new devices. That's my guess. - stmiller, on 10/11/2007, -1/+14"You need it for .mov -- that or ffmpeg, Quicktime Alternative."
VLC. - jonahan52, on 10/11/2007, -7/+20Are you all seriously whining about better quality YouTube videos??
- MikeOSX, on 10/11/2007, -0/+12I have been saying this in every single appleTV/youtube story on digg the past few days and have gotten dugg down. Ignorance is bliss.
- NSResponder, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11"you need to pay money to implement it."
The members of the H.264 patent pool really want the H.264 standard to be used, so they've made the royalties very reasonable. My company won't owe any patent royalties until we've sold hundreds of thousands of units, and at that point the royalty is somewhere around a nickel per codec, IIRC. At that rate, the patent royalties are trivial.
-jcr - zydeco, on 10/11/2007, -1/+12Flash 8 is using a codec from On2 Technologies. They could have just as easily have put in H.264, but they chose On2 instead.
You don't need Flash to watch a YouTube video, just the codec. The player just gets delivered to you with the stream URL embedded, which is probably their way of keeping the video on their site and not getting ripped everywhere else. - Raian, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10I wonder where we can get access to the h.264 versions other than from the Appletv
- NSResponder, on 10/11/2007, -3/+13" just so the tiny portion of users on their new iPhone can access it."
It's not just the iPhone. It's also the PSP, the TV, the iPod, and every PC that has a copy of iTunes installed.
H.264 is not merely better, it's vastly better.
-jcr - LoganT, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10They are not going to be converting the .FLV's on Youtube to H.264. They are going to be converting the original videos.
- anonym41414, on 10/11/2007, -0/+10What was it George Carlin said about trying to find better shows on TV? "There's a knob called 'brightness,' but it doesn't work."
- Ub3rg33k, on 10/11/2007, -3/+13H264 is not Apple technology. It is an open standard.
- mastercheif, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10The Gap
The Google Apple Project - tlogank, on 10/11/2007, -4/+13still...makes me wonder if this will be done on the fly when accessed or if they will actually be going to the trouble to re encode their entire catalog of videos (which I imagine is millions of videos). Seems like an awful lot of work to me. Also...this means the iPhone doesn't support flash?...c'mon Apple...for that much money it would be a stupid to not support flash on something so expensive.
@NSResponder: whether you believe flash to be crap or not, it's still running on a large number of websites out there-websites that aren't going to change their whole format just so the tiny portion of users on their new iPhone can access it. - inactive, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8sorenson codec used by flash 7 is actually tweaked h264
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorenson_Spark - monkeyrun, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8that's not possible when you are talking about hundreds of hits per second.
and converting to H.264 is slow. - TEX1, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8EXACTLY, this is one of the more exciting things I've dugg in a long time. I see this as the turning point to true IP tv. This is the real reason GOOGLE bought YouTube.
- Mejogid, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7Seeing as the Flash SDK - which allows you to compile a flash player for a given architecture - only goes up to version 7, it would have been hard and potentailly leave them open to law suites from Adobe.
- MrKite, on 10/11/2007, -2/+9Flash will support H.264.
- NSResponder, on 10/11/2007, -3/+10FLV will last as long as .avi has, unfortunately. It will become more and more scarce over the next few years, but it will still be out there to hurt our eyes when we least expect it.
-jcr - superkendall, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6That would be easier, but would look worse - remember the Apple TV is dedicated to HD displays. People were laughing before at watching YouTube on a 60" TV - now they understand why it's not as silly an idea as it first seemed.
- NSResponder, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6" it was created by two companies"
No, it was created by quite a few more companies than that. Look up who the members of the H.264 patent consortium are.
-jcr - Ub3rg33k, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Why is this a surprise? Google has been using H264 to encode their videos for a loooong time. Note that the first name under "People Using x264" http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html . Its been that way forever. What did you think they were doing with it?
Edit : that's not to say there were specifically doing it for Apple, its more that they were planning to move to H264 for streaming to mobile for a long time. - superkendall, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Check out the AppleTV YouTube announcement stories - they are CHOCK FULL of people whining about YouTube video on a big screen TV looking like hell.
- normalkid, on 10/11/2007, -2/+7since the ipod probably uses a dedicated media chip that handles the video... I'd guess pretty hard to add it later as a software update.
- gweedo767, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Yeah, if only Adobe would release the SDK for Flash versions greater than 7. Flash 7 is held as the default because mobile and non-standard platforms can use it (like the Wii). Adobe won't release the Flash 8-9 SDK for people to develop players on other non-standard platforms.
- makis, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4ffmpeg
- tobsterius, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4or all the web games. The main issue here is, quite simply, the flash plug in for OS X is resource hog. It's really the only time my MacBook runs its fans at what I can only assume is at full rev. Adobe has yet to fix this.
If Apple adds flash, I hope they handle it, since Adobe can't seem to get its act together in regards to the flash plug in. Now granted, it's not Adobe's fault. Historically, flash playback has *never* been great on the Mac. - cynicist, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4It's been around for a while. Been under a rock lately?
(no offense, I'm a nerd) - princeblah, on 10/11/2007, -10/+14hmm... seems like a pretty potent partnership - goog and appl..... wonder what comes next from it?
- KryptoniteKid, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Anyone know what this means for users of the Wii Opera browser or Xbox Media Center Youtube scripts??
- SPECOPS, on 10/11/2007, -4/+8I can see all the fuss for the Apple TV/Video-iPod, but, for the iPhone, it's supposed to be running on OSX, and running the FULL version of Safari. When I first install OSX, I get Safari, and Safari will play youtube videos out of the box (yes flash), I'm being promised that the iPhone will have the same full internet experience. I think this video conversion has nothing to do with the iPhone, and 100% to do with the Apple TV.
- Ub3rg33k, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5They aren't changing a thing. Parent company Google has always held H264 as a standard. This has been in the works for a long time.
- cynicist, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3The author admits in the article that he used a crappy proprietary implementation of the codec...
- metalica77, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4I don't understand how they'll transcode all that stuff. The source material is crap so what are they getting at there?
- HappyScrappy, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Actually, H.264's tricks are more memory intensive than CPU intensive. It allows multiple reference frames. By having multiple reference frames, frame differencing is more efficient and compression is more efficient. You can see how during a cross fade, having two reference frames (fade from frame and fade to frame) is helpful. H.264 supports up to 8 reference frames, for what reason I don't know.
- HerrEisenheim, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4And just some more information for those interested, since this thread is full of misinformation.
The VP6 codec is actually on par with H.264 for streaming web video. Single-pass encoded files will have roughly the same quality. They also take about the same time to encode. The H.264 file will be smaller, but once it is hinted and optimized for web, it will be larger and ends up begin about the same size. There is still a small savings with H.264 because of it's support for AAC encoded audio (where VP6 only supports MP3). BOTH VP6 and H.264 are patent encumbered. However, x264 (open source) lets you create H.264 compatible files, and no one has made a fuss....yet. There is currently NO OPEN SOURCE way to create VP6. You have to pay On2 Technologies for both the licensing and the software. They charge about $1m per 10m encodes (based on a 2 minute "unit") + annual fees. Actual licensing for H.264 is even MORE expensive. Several times the price if I recall correctly.
Most of what we see with Flash isn't VP6 though. In fact, Flash is simply a container. It's not a codec. The codecs are VP3 and VP6. Technically, Flash could use any codec...from XviD to H.264, but Adobe/Macomedia has chosen to only support On2 codecs. The previous code, VP3, is quasi-open source. It's still patented, but On2 gave it away to the open source world. VP3 is the basis for Theora video, the OSS counterpart to Ogg Vorbis, Speex, and FLAC; all hosted by the Xiph.org Foundation. VP3 is what most sites use, because it's free an support by FFmpeg. - richardhenry, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3How about YouTube on Frontrow too? That would be pretty sweet.
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