Eugenia Loli's Journal: The sorry state of h.264 on the PC - UPDATED

Until QuickTime 7 is released for Windows, expect very poor support for the promising h.264 codec under Windows. I downloaded all available h.264 solutions for Windows today and the problems were severe:

1. The 'Moonlight-Elecard MPEG Player' does not have sound support for Apple's HD trailers (encoded with AAC) and it's skipping frames a lot on my brand new P4-630 3 GHz PC (1920x700 resolution of the clip) and has no sound support for AAC.

2. The DivX codec/player: Windows Media Player 10 and its third party codec coming from the DivX player is not better performance-wise either. Note that Apple machines can do it almost full speed on the aging memory-bandwidth-wise G4s 1.5 GHz and above (the G5s can do it easier). The Mac Mini 1.42 GHz G4 was skipping a few frames (I tried it yesterday at the Apple Store), but it was still fully usable (no sound skipping), while a 3 GHz PC can't run the same clip as fast because the current solutions are not optimized-enough (and they don't even decode sound)!

3. The Fastvdo codec that runs on top of Windows Media Player 10: WMP on XP-SP2 *crashes* every time I try to play an h.264 video! I had to uninstall that third party codec moments after I installed it.

4. VideoLAN and FFmpeg projects are working on a solution as we speak, but it's still very early, very unoptmized and not fully compatible either. It will take many months before we have good support of h.264 under Linux/Windows through ffmpeg.

In other words, if you really need good h.264 support, buy a G5 Mac, or wait for Quicktime 7 for Windows (and we are not even sure if QT for Windows will be as optimized as its OSX counterpart anyway). In both cases, the solution is Apple.

UPDATE: Here is a screenshot of QT 7 on OSX playing an HD h.264 video (resolution of the video is 1920x1080). Apparently my dual G4 PowerMac 1.25 GHz is as fast as the Mac Mini 1.42 when playing these videos (usable, but a bit choppy). A G5, a 23+" LCD (or a CRT that can go up to 1920 pixels wide at a decent refresh rate) and QuickTime Pro are highly recommended in order to fully experience these high resolution videos.

UPDATE 2: The Moonlight-Elecard guys read about my complaints and JUST sent me a new version of their h.264 codec and now I am able to run the HD videos on my P4 without skipping frames!! YES! There is still no AAC sound support, but this is coming soon as well. I am happy now, these guys are fast. :)

UPDATE 3: AAC sound support is now here too! They just sent it to me. They are quick! :o