High Definition (HD) Encoding
Over the past several years, I have been asked many times about our plans for HD encoding. It seems that ever since HD was first mentioned in the press, people have been asking for realtime HD encoding from us.
Well, we here at Wired have had HD encoding designed up for over two years now. So why haven’t we released it? In one simple word….Format. What format of HD do you want to have? Well of course this depends on what you are encoding for.
When BluRay and HD-DVD were coming out, we assumed a single MPEG compression standard would be adopted and then everyone would know what type of encoding/decoding would be involved. Well, as you may not know, the standard did NOT decide on a single compression format. They let THREE different compression formats exist in the specification. That’s right, you can have MPEG2-HD, h.264-HD (AVC), or Windows Media-HD (VC1) on your disk.
Well that doesn’t settle anything. By allowing different formats, you make a complete mess of the encoding and decoding market. How is this a standard when you are allowed to have three different competing compression formats. This is what I call ‘Decision by Indecision.’ No one wanted to put their foot down and make a final decision, so we have three different compression formats for the discs.
And it gets worse. Apple announced in 2005 that they will be supporting the h.264 (AVC) format. Sony announced they will be supporting the MPEG2-HD format. Microsoft announced they will be supporting the WM-HD (VC1) format. So as you can see, we now have different companies supporting different compressors for HD disc authoring and playback. What a mess.
So in order to satisfy our encoding customers, we would need a separate encoder product for each of the compression formats in the spec. That would mean you as a customer would need to either decide what format to support ahead of time, or buy three different encoder boards. This is not realistic. So we here at Wired are taking a ‘wait and see’ attitude about HD encoding. Maybe a single format will come out as a dominant player, which then we would support. But until then, we sit on the sidelines, watch, and wait.
– Mark Bain
Hi, guys:
Currently I am switching from PC to Mac? I am using Canon ZR100 camcorder, I am planning to buy a SONY HDR-HC3 1080i HD camcorder and a Mac laptop, due to $$, I want to buy the $1200 MacBook with 64 M share memory, and cannot afford MacBook Pro, since you folks are experts, can you tell me if the black MacBook (2.0 GHz Duo Core) will be powerful enough to play 1080i Video? I am trying to copy HDV to MacBook and then burn the original file to DVD-R, I am not planning to edit video on the MacBook? so I want to know if it is enough to handle that, BTW, I used the MacBook to play 1080p Video from apple.com, it is flawless.
Since the HDV is compressed, I do not know if the MacBook with 64M video memory is enough?
thanks a lot and bring more good stuff to us. Take care!!!!
Kenny
Sounds familiar. Oh yeah. VHS vs. Beta. I knew it sounded familiar. Perhaps someday there will be a band called Blu-ray or HD-DVD, because right now there is a band called VHS or Beta.
http://www.vhsorbeta.com/main.html
This is a terrible excuse for not releasing an HD mpeg-2 encoder right now. Both formats (Blu-Ray & HD-DVD) support mpeg-2, and the chipsets should be relatively cheap (since they’ve been on the market for a long time and are used widely).
Just because a product doesn’t support every flavor under the sun doesn’t mean it’s not a valuable and useful product. The current Wired Inc Media Press doesn’t create files in QuickTime, Flash, WMV, H264, or other formats, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an incredibly useful product that is needed by many people.
The Mac market needs a real-time hardware hi-def encoder (not to mention a refresh of the Media Press X to work in the new Intel Mac Pro boxes).
I’d buy one of each!
Please!
Eric Kornblum
Electronic Arts
Eric,
We’ve been searching far and wide for a suitable chipset to enable the creation of a reasonably priced HD encoder. Unfortunately, there’s just not anything out there. The available chips are so expensive that an encoder using them would have to sell for around $50,000. Since there are already encoders in that range (Tandberg, Envivio, NTT) we don’t see much point in creating another one.
Sony is known to have an inexpensive (relatively) HD chip, but they won’t sell it to anyone else.
We are not big enough to develop our own processors, so until one of the big chip companies makes something, we are stuck.
Mike