Joe Kane loves VC-1
I have a lot of respect for Joe Kane. I have used DVE (Digital Video Essentials) to calibrate my systems and it does the job very well. I read somewhere before he came out with the latest DVE that Joe had talked to Microsoft on the VC-1 codec and was blown away by what it supposedly could do for video.
So fast forward to today and Joe is showing off the VC-1 codec compared to the antiquated MPG-2. I guess he got lots of “ooo’s and ahhhh’s”.
I have never been a lover of Microsoft, but it seems they have done themselves proud with this codec. I would, however, like to see this against MPG-4 (h.263) and Divx. These two camps have also done some good things with their latest codecs.
Check out our new sister blog on Home Theater, HTBlog.net
September 19th, 2006 at 10:48 am
I saw Joe Kane’s demo on the Microsoft booth at the NAB in… 2004. He compared clips of his very own Digital Video Essentials in 720p D-Theater (25Mbps Mpeg-2) and the same in 8 Mbps WMV9 (which wasn’t called VC-1 yet) on a Samsung DLP projector (optimized and calibrated by his holiness himself).
And the windows media files blew the D-VHS out of the water every time.
That’s why when I heard that Sony claimed Mpeg-2 was good enough for HD and that they’d stick to it with their magic Blu-Ray discs, I thought they were really really stupid.
I still think they are. Inferior video codec, storage-hungry uncompressed PCM against lossless compressed Dolby and DTS, they’re just plain nuts. No wonder the first Blu-Ray releases looked like crap (even the first Samsung demo looked like shit, a shame for a demo disc). Happily for Blu-Ray, all studios are not that insane.
October 16th, 2006 at 12:55 am
“I would, however, like to see this against MPG-4 (h.263)”
if you compare it to h.263, you’ll see that VC-1 is far superior. h.264, however, the format used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray like VC-1, is (IMHO) much better than VC-1.
October 16th, 2006 at 10:48 am
H.263 can be just as good as VC-1, and H.263 was created to be streamed efficiently. This makes H.263 a better all around codec. People have thought that DTS was superior to DD, but most didn’t know that DTS most of the time used a higher bandwidth setting. When DD started upping their settings to that equal of DTS, you couldn’t tell the difference.