My New Favorite Codec: h264

In preparation for 40 hours worth of flights coming up, I have been preparing loads of television programming for viewing on my laptop. This includes the West Wing (seasons 1 and part of 2), South Park (seasons 1-4, 6 & 7) and Farscape (best of season 1). I don't want to lug all those DVDs around, so I am condensing them into smaller, computer-only viewable files. In that pursuit, I have been experimenting with the latest codecs: Xvid, DivX, MPEG-4 (implementation via ffmpeg) and the latest kid on the block: h264.

h264 has been just recently added to my mac encoder ffmpegX -- it is slow to encode (probably three times as slow as DivX) but boy howdy! does it create georgeous rips. It reduced the file size down to ~20% of the original MPEG-2 file with no loss in frame size (frame is still 720 px wide), frame rate or visible quality that I can see.

Doing some sniffing for another reason, I re-stumbled across Apple's Tiger preview page on the topic. Combine that with the new iMacs or some form factor similar and that the new HDTV DVDs (well, at least one version of the new HD DVDs -- but the splintered world of HD DVDs is a rant for a different post) support h264 as one of the codecs and you have the Apple future of consumer HDTV.

Given Jobs' dual CEOness, I expect him to have figured out both the content and the tech sides. I imagine he will update Quicktime to do something similar to that of iTunes music store where you can buy HDTV content online. (Read Mark Cuban's thoughts on this development of this as well.)

My prediction: this time next year, there will be some Pixar (Incredibles?)HDTV release for viewing on your Mac.