UnQuack

edit: Additional thoughts late August 2005: Apple must have fixed the performance issue, a h264 movie that took 60-70% CPU using the first Windows QT7 preview, uses just 35-40% CPU using preview version 3. Here are my initial thoughts after 1 day with Quicktime 7 Preview edition on the PC: Some of the improvements over v6: No taskbar icon = good, as this puts some users off having quicktime installed, using the logic that lots of icons next to clock = wasted RAM). Its still available as an option, but is not on as default it seems. (hopefully, unless this is just because I already had it disabled in QT6) No nag screen (as with Mac version 7, pro features are greyed out and labelled pro) Quicktime settings look way more like PC users are used to, and seem useful. As of writing, The HD movie samples on Apples site dont appear to work within browser on PC using IE6 and this Quicktime 7 preview. The buttons on the site to play the movies simply dont work. Encoding to H264 .mp4 files: Footage that took around 7 minutes to encode to H264 on my iMac 2Ghz Tiger 512MB, took 5 minutes to encode on 2Ghz AMD64-based PC system (XP SP2, 1024MB, SATA HDD, nforce3 chipset, dual DDR400 RAM). Quality appeared identical to me eyes, filesize was the same. qt7 PC encoded content plays fine on Mac and Mac encoded content plays fine on PC. These results are pretty much as expected, but I need to test more to be certain the above is fair. Playing H264: Playing 2 H264 320 240 25fps videos simultaneously, both at doublesize, used the following CPU amounts during playback: iMac: 42-50% CPU PC : 25-30% CPU However this situation was reversed when it came to Apples HD samples. The BBC Motion 720p version played fine on iMac at 24fps, using about 79-84% of CPU On the PC it struggled along at about half the actual framerate, using 90% CPU. Even larger HD files come to a grinding halt on my PC. If I turn the BBC file from a mov to MP4 container, I can then play it in Nero Showtime, an alternative player that can handle H264. I cant see a framerate reading with this app but it looks smooth, at or near the true framerate. Possible explanations: Apple made a mistake or failed to optimise HD H264 playback code on PC Something on my PC causes this and it may work fine on other PCs Something about the iMac G5 CPU suits the maths used to decode H264 far better than my AMD chip in my PC (probably unlikely as Nero can play the file OK) This only really affects HD footage, 320 240 and 720 576 H264 plays back just fine on my PC. Still it would seem that Apple have some work to do, but at least encoding seems to be fine with PC Preview edition so far. Need to find out how well non-HD H264 plays on slower machines.

Sorry that I havent updated this site as planned. I got distracted by many things, not least of which has been delving into the world of the Mac for the first time. Anyway this is my first attempt at trying to encode footage at its original resolution and framerate. Technical details to follow. Its just a test really, footage is from Birmingham UK whilst I was at the avituk05 VJ event (that I totally failed to videoblog). H.264 Full PAL Resolution Test (15MB)

I thought I should probably put some effort into creating short intro animation for the avit videoblogs. This is just a test video done in a hurry (but it still took hours), wish I had more time to create such things. avituk05 Unquacked test

Here s where I live on this amazing planet, courtesy of the lovely NASA World Wind software. I like this program so much I intend to feature it in several longer and more detailed videoblogs in the future. My Town

Badly told story of my Elbow. Made using a pocketpc mobile phone, I think I need to mess with the audio settings to get better quality. ElbowPhone

Oh well this isnt much of a first videoblog, but I said Id do one today and theres only 10 minutes of today left so here it is. Production values couldnt be worse if I tried lol oh well, hopefully the next one wont be so rushed. AntOnTv