digital music/video
12/22/2005, 5:30pm, EST
Thursday, December 22nd
Digigami touts MPEG-2 over H.264
Digigami today announced that its new MegaPEG HDTV VBR MPEG-2 encoder is capable of matching, and in some cases exceeding the picture quality of current H.264 encoders while simultaneously offering reduced bitrates. Echoing Sony's recent claims that MPEG-2 can and will achieve quality/bitrates comparable to H.264 for the next generation of optical disc formats, the company said that its MPEG-2 encoder is "actually outperforming H.264 by a wide margin on 720p/1080p film content. Typically, our HD MPEG-2 encoder can produce VBR files two thirds to one half the bitrate produced by current H.264 encoders. On our website we have compressed material which supports this assertion." Apple's video iPod uses the H.264 format to play movies, as does its QuickTime 7 software. The Digigami MegaPEG HDTV VBR MPEG-2 encoder is available for $1,000 (system requirements were unavailable).
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Based on what I've seen from both of these formats, I'm a little skeptical that their claims hold up for more than a very specific subset of source materials, but it is possible.
Reason being that while h.264 handles a wide range of bitrates and material, it's possible that in the specific circumstance of very high bitrate, very large frame, progressive content (next-gen-DVD, that is), it comes out ahead. That is, after all, what it was designed to do in the first place.
I'd randomly guess that the advantage would come with MPEG2's superior ability to handle film grain without smoothing it over, but I don't know anything about it.
Beside jokes, we will trade for higher resolution only? No 10bit per channel? No sound formats higher than DTS:NEO ?