H.264 Making Triumphant Return

I figured I'd write up this post before I got started on the books for the day.

Those of you who are my long-time readers may remember my interest in various new types of video compression technoloy. For those of you who are *really* my fans may remember back in 2002 when I was keeping track on a new promising technology called MPEG AVC aka. MPEG-4 Part 10 aka. H.26L aka. H.264. I first discovered the codec back in February of 2002, but at the time, I had thought it was dead, and wasn't going to go anywhere. Then there was some amount of revival in July, 2002, but it didn't sound as if it would be used for DVD compression. The big turnaround came in October, 2002. On the 13th, a news article was released, stating that development on H.264 was going strong, and the possibilities were promising. The next day, on October 14th, I found an announcement about a project at Sourceforge.net to create an open source H.264 encoder. Then on the 28th, an early codec comparison was done to see how H.264 performed (and it did quite well for an early alpha). Unfortunately, I haven't heard any news on H.264 since then, until the past couple days.

Leave it up to the anime encoders. The anime encoders were one of the first groups of people to adopt the Ogg Media Format, and the Matroska format. While the American ripping groups are still using standard MP3 and DivX in an AVI, the anime groups are using surround sound AAC in two languages with multiple switchable "soft" subtitles, while XviD provides the video, all wrapped in a cozy MKV. These people are right at the forefront of ripping, and know more about filters, pre-processors and post-processors than most rippers do. It looks like they are also going to start adopting H.264. I've already downloaded three episodes of GANTZ in H.264, and they look great. Unfortunately, as is nature with H.264, I am barely capable of watching the videos on my 500MHz machine. On a 3GHz machine, the video decoding takes up about 30-40% of the CPU. I don't have the capabilities to do any comparisons at the moment, but I will download the DivX version of GANTZ, hoping that the bitrates and resolutions are the same, and I will try doing some rough codec comparisons over the summer.

So far, Anime-4ever is currently in test mode with H.264 (they've got GANTZ, Inu Yasha, Spiral, Gate Keepers, Get Backers, and a couple others in both H.264 and DivX), and Zhentarim is thinking about making the switch soon.

If you'd like to try watching some H.264 encodes, and are on a Windows machine, then follow a4e's AVC Playback Guide. If you're on Linux, then go get the latest CVS of MPlayer (1.0pre6a isn't good enough), along with the essential codec pack (all codec pack is much cooler though, so grab that instead of essential). Have fun!