Pefect, well that is good.
Someone at Apples stand claimed a maximum of 14mbit, now i wonder if he meant HD AVC on a HD-DVD or Blu-Ray.
They demostrated a AVC stream @ 8mbit at full HD res. It was the I-Robot trailer, lots and lots of action. It surely looked spectacular, but the flaws were easy to see. Low action scenes with big areas like a a dark wall that had a slight fade to grey showed banding , it just looked ugly, and this was on a 24 inch display. I don't dare to think about that on a big screen
I discussed this with a lady who was presenting this clip, i asked why not use 16 mbit, get rid of the artifacts and everybody would profit. Lets just say her answers weren't what i would like to hear. "This is what the mass market wants", hell yeah the mass markets wants something that isn't the best it could be?
I'm wondering if the AVC/VM9 codecs is going to be limited to a bitrate way below the maximum transfer rate, for example 8mbit, it would make sense since a higher bitrate needs more power in the hardware?.
Microsoft were showing of their codec as well, and they showed it next to AVC, and to no surprise AVC got beat by a good margin (it was a MS demo stand + VM9 is far ahead in the development). They also claimed that the encoding time on AVC was longer (days vs minutes!!).
It's clear to me that the AVC codec can be improved (think DVD launch quality and now), it was pretty much "beta" everything we saw, and there is plenty of room to grow.
But i still came away with the impression that just because it was technical impressive to be showing that quality @ 8mbit everything was "good" eventhough it just didn't look as good as MPEG2 (at a much higher bitrate).
What good is it that a MPEG2 stream @ 16 mbit looks as good as a AVC stream @ 8 mbit if you never would accept the 16mbit MPEG2 quality in the first place but would rather up the bitrate?
So, what looked best? Well how about a
40mbit MPEG2 demostration 8) , pure bliss, HD of course video with a crazy amount of big white areas, no artifacts, pans over tress etc etc..
