H.264 scares me

13 Jul 2005

In an “its coolness chills me to the bone” kind of way. I’m scared because of what it apparently requires, and I’m scared because of the supposed quality of it. I’ve downloaded — probably foolishly — a trailer for Batman Begins (hey, there isn’t much material out there!) in 1920×1080 resolution, and all my computer could do was crash. In Totem (xine) and MPlayer. Apparently the latest version of MPlayer should work with H.264, but I’m not prepared to break my apt upgrading in order to test before the official packages are available – impatient though I am to see my Athlon 2200+ with 768MB of RAM get absolutely punished during playback of this video, I can wait a week or two.

Having said that, however, MPlayer did manage to decode the first 25 frames of (strangely enough) the higher resolution (1920×1080) video. If I had to give a reason for the image appearing to have bled, I’d say it’s because the application was failing to decode each frame in realtime, although I’m sure there are far more plausible explanations out there (like, oh, let’s see – the application doesn’t officially even support H.264 at all in that version?). You can click on the image below to see a ratings advisory screen in truely mean detail, even if it has bled a bit. And been compressed a bit. Okay, so it’s not really that great – but the resolution!

No, the real and present danger at this point is that I will waltz across the room (or, you know, spin my chair around and move two metres or so) to an otherwise-perfectly-okay Pentium 3 running Windows XP, and try installing Quicktime 7 to playback the same file. Actually, I’d be perfectly happy if it could adequately playback the 852×480 version, I think.

But then, it’s Batman, and I don’t think I could actually care that much…