The Nero codec will spit out 1280 x 720. Nero's booth, Apex booth were both running the Nero-encoded AVC codec on their HD monitors in a variety of sizes. We fed the Nero encoders with media straight from the 4:2:2 render we did in Vegas, and the quality was stunning. Not sure if anyone here saw the demo media that we put together for the CES show, but it was killer sweet and clean. It also showed at Studio 54 in the MGM, but it was fed from a hard drive system.
Apex has announced and is delivering AVC decoding on their DVD players, scheduled to hit the US in early March. They had hardware units (working ones) at the CES show, as they already distro these in Europe.
FWIW, the YUV 4:2:2 tests rendered from the Cineform codec was 400 meg.
the resulting MPEG2 was 8 meg, and the Nero Recode is 4.33 meg. And it renders incredibly fast.

It definitely is sweet isnt it? Now imagine that quality and file size combined with Blu Ray capacity. AMAZING!

I view my encodes on a 21" CRT 1280x720p and never miss a frame. Ateme certainly has done thier job with coding efficiency and heres the kicker...its only going to get better and faster once they implement their high profiles.

I was expecting more compression; 3:1 when compared to MPEG2 would be nice.

mainconcept H.264 is really nice too, but it is not vegas friendly, at less not last summer.

Two things come to mins.

Firstly, if such good results can be achieved with H264 / mpeg-2 / wmv 9 at reasonable bitrates why do we need anything with more capacity than existing DL DVDs? That's been one reason why I felt as a consummer format BluRay was going no where, the march of technology had made it's large capacity unneeded.

However I'm not certain I'm right. Talking to some of the gurus from Canopus I was kind of shot down in flames. For certain they said the very clever compression systems such as mpeg-4 were very good at achieving good quality at low bitrates, way better than anything we had before. But when you go for the very best quality at higher bitrate they looses their edge. Mpeg-2 is still unbeatable, in fact they suggested for the very best quality mpeg-1 was still superior, I assume their comments were regardless of bandwidth.

Now maybe they and Sony are right, I sure don't know enough about this to be certain either way. Perhaps this is why Sony have stuck with BluRay and mpeg-2?
Bob.

So, for someone who has not clue about H264, what is it, and what is it used for? Would it be of use to me with Vegas?

Sorry to sound dumb, but I like to present my real self.

Caruso

H.264 is a standards based development track run by the ITU-Telecommunications working group. The people that make the standards for us to talk and play together with a mostly open approach to explaining the inner workings to all those who want to adhere to the standard.
Sometimes standards are good, sometimes they hold us back and other times they are the lowest common denominator that we overlook whilst we use the whizzier bleeding edge equivalent. Standards are pleasing to understand but nothing must be sub-standard and some people will live in the "better than standard" domain and this sometimes works against you (c.f. WMV9).

HD WMV9 especially in the interlaced video form is bleeding edge and requires microsoft kit and XP based player software to do it justice. It is a distant relative of MPEG-4. However H.264 can offer all it does apart from some aspects of the compression ratio (quality:bitrate) and the manner of the digital rights management.

H.264 is directly related to MPEG-4. However it describes MPEG-4 in a certain point in time and kit that says H.264 compliant should play anyone elses H.264 media. So generally, at this point in time, it is good.

H263, the natural predecessor gave us those video phones that worked over normal grade plain old telephone and ISDN lines or multiples thereof. It was a bit dated and wholly inappropriate to consider for broadband Internet lines and the likes of BD-Video. HD resolution H.264 still deserves true broadband lines, not the ADSLv1 and shared cable modem bandwidths we call broadband today.

H.264 gives a pleasant feel to encoding for playback in dedicated hardware players, 3G mobile phones, computers, kiosks, car dashboards etc With more uptake likely than microsoft 9series enabled players other than PCs. However you might encode to both as 9series is a pretty good story too, despite the constraints.

H264 and the Nero AVC codec are different.
Same container but different coding algo's.
For anyone interested in the codec quality visit Doom9 and find "the codec shootout"

AudioIvan

"H264 and the Nero AVC codec are different."- AudioIvan

Are you saying that H264 and Nero AVC are unrelated? If so, let me clarify, that Nero AVC is a direct implementation of the H264 standard and to date, is the most compliant implementation of the H.264 AVC standard.

Doom9's codec shoot out was right on the money. Hands down Nero AVC wins. Only thing XVID had an advantage on was speed but dotn overlook that Nero was pretty close on speed and it was doing AVC encoding which is much more CPU intensive than XVID.

don't know how long apex going to be selling those units as the Chinese gov. is holding the pres. of apex in jail and apex has been sued for 485 million USD for non payment of that amount to their Chinese suppliers.. Apex brand was pulled off many major retailers shelves during the holidays (including walmart) ... There are several other brands taking up the march though ...

PowerEncoder MPEG4 AVC Edition v1.0 by CyberLink has been out now for awhile , before nero, as an alternative also -- works fine .. includes H264 , will capture directly from DV to H264 also ..

Of course they are related, I'm not saying they're not.
Just Nero H264 ASP uses different coding techiques, therefore the speed.
Nero AVC uses optimized quantization matrices,post processing, therefore the quality.
One of the Nero developers just announced that stand alone DVD player with FULL AVC support will be available very soon(most probably Sigma Design chipset).
IMHO Nero's AVC it's got very bright future,
I can't wait to get hands on the DVD player.

AudioIvan

sorenson squeeze 4 will also do h.264... but unfortunately there are no software media players that will work correctly with h.264, so the format is nothing more than an object of curiosity at this point.

yes, i have the nero player, but nero-encoded h.264 files only play black on two different pc's... it's bogus, and until the vlc, bs, qt, and other players work with h.264, there is no practical application for it.

I totally agree. I hear everyone wondering what HD-DVD will be like and most dont understand that this is HD-DVD only not on a set top player yet. The sooner the better for me.

I bought Sorenson 4 when it was released just for the H.264 AVC and I have to say that it was the worst $150 I ever spent. Their encode process was the slowest thing ever and as you said, nothing would play it back correctly.

The funny thing about H.264 is that it has been in development a lot shorter time than previous codecs like Mpeg-1/2. Give H.264 the same amount of time in development that even Mpeg-4 (Divx, XVID, etc..) have had, and it will bury everything that preceeded it.

The best thing to me about H.264 is I no longer have to be married to MS for content delivery whether it be streaming, DVD delivery, etc... Now if Nero could implement some DRM for internet authorization and device playback, the world would be perfect for me.

H.264 has been in development since 1999/2000 .. how much longer time do you think it should have had?

VideoLocus had a H264 encoder out in 2002 in fact ..

EnvivioTV has a plug in for H264 for windows media player ..

also:
VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a free decoder (H264 is beta) that can play back various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, ...) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

I believe the specs were relased then but there was no reference encoder/decoder available. H.264 didnt really get under serious development until the last couple years. Mpeg-2 encoding gained more efficiency once every one was a player in the game and DVD sales became the norm for distribution.

Now you have four major players implementing the codec (Ateme/Nero, Cyberlink, Sorenson, mainconcept.) Apple and Sony are devleoping but have yet to release anything to the public and sure are more to follow.

Without sounding like HDV dude trying to shove H.264 down everyones throat, there is a reason H.264 was included in both HD-DVD/Blu Ray specs. H.264 is the current future which offers the best quality at an acceptable file size.

I encoded some of Spots HDV offerings a bit back and theres no way you can distinguish the difference between the source and the H.264 output while cutting the file size down by 1/10.

the vlc player does not yet work correctly with h.264... i believe that there are issues with the bi-directional prediction encoding during playback.

the envivio plugin for mpeg4 is no longer a freebie.

so we are left with a great little h.264 codec that nobody can watch :-(

Thats because the player developers havent implemented H.264 correctly yet.

The reason many havent moved to H.264 is because they dont want ot pay the licensing fees that are required.

We will be fine :)