The key here is Cisco is paying the patent royalties for anyone who uses their codec binaries - which will cost them $6.5m/year. They could do the same for x264, but it's probably legally safer to distribute an implementation they wrote themselves.
If the x264 people think they can give x264 to Cisco under a license that we can compile it and distribute the binaries with no changes to our MPEG LA licensing agreements, tell them to get talk of me (fluffy@cisco.com) if they want to do this. I came to the conclusion Cisco could not do this without x264 giving us an appropriate license.
Works great. You can put 3 hours of 1080p24 content on a single layer DVD (4.4 GB) and it still looks great. And there's room left for a soundtrack too.
Well it looks ok, but lots of detail is lost, especially if the source is grainy. I usually don't bother and go for 720p, but when you need great quality, you need 8-12GB for 1080p.
That's what we're all told to expect. It's not really the case. Is there some loss? Yes, of course. Is it bad, or even noticeable? Everyone who is not a video geek would not notice a thing. Heck, even I do not notice anything amiss, except for scenes with a lot of motion. This is on large high-quality screens at the optimal viewing distance.
As far as I can tell, it's not the graininess that eats up the bit budget, it's motion, and complex fine patterns. Moderately grainy sources such as average film stock don't seem to have a large visual impact. But what does have an impact is either lots of motion in the field, or complex "islamic-art-like" patterns, or especially both together.
I've put even 3 h 45 min of film stock on a single-layer DVD, at 1080p24. Again, the vast majority of people could not tell the difference. Low motion scenes were perfect. There was some artifacting on high motion segments, but it's not the ugly, blocky, unnatural stuff you see on MPEG2. It was blending into the nearby shapes, more flowing and organic-like.
2 hours or less and I can't tell the difference from the source material at all (I haven't done A/B comparisons). Around 3 hours I can tell - although it's pretty minimal. The threshold must be somewhere in between. I would only think of splitting it, or using double-layer DVD, somewhere near 4 hours.
I use the latest x264, with MeGUI, and the AVCHD profile as defined in MeGUI, with the Film tuning, and 2-pass encoding in order to hit a pre-defined file size.
I remember the days when I was transcoding 480i DV tapes onto SVCD, with mpeg2enc. We've come a long way. :)
Among other reasons, x264 is GPL-encumbered, which would make it impossible to bundle with the sorts of projects that openh264 is going to be bundled with.
It's actually dual-licenced GPL and an alternative where you don't get the so-called "viral" properties of the GPL, but changes to the code still get returned to the project, kind-of LGPL-ish.
That seems to suit what Cisco are doing here, but a Cisco representative claimed that when they suggested just using x264 that it was shot down by Mozilla (possibly because Mozilla shared the common misconception than x264 is GPL-only?)
