Something big is coming to the BBC Motion gallery:
Stay tuned, because in the very near future, BBC Motion Gallery will be launching a whole new way to look at footage. Soon, you’ll be able to view and download spectacular motion previews that are bigger and faster than ever before.
In fact, our new motion previews are four times the size of the industry standard, giving you unprecedented detail and a rich, encompassing viewing experience. Once you’ve found the imagery you like, you can download the preview clips and begin your edit straight away. At BBC Motion Gallery, we will always be enhancing our site to make it ever more useful. Much like the creative process itself, it’s a never-ending evolution.
We all craved them, but in the past previews this large just weren’t feasible, given bandwidth limitations. But thanks to the ultra-efficient new QuickTime 7 H.264 video codec, we will be able to deliver mouth-watering 720×486 (NTSC) or 720×579 (PAL) previews with stunning video quality at low data rates, which means crisp, clear video in much smaller files.
Our goal is to not only deliver remarkable previews, but to make certain that our footage fully integrates with your digital pre-production workflow — perhaps in ways you never imagined.
For example, BBC Motion Gallery previews in QuickTime 7 will soon contain a rich body of metadata searchable via the new Spotlight feature in Apple’s Mac OS X “Tiger” operating system. This feature alone could change the very way in which you search for footage.
QuickTime 7 makes the future of video crystal clear with new features including user-friendly controls and pristine H.264 video. This remarkably efficient codec allows the highest quality previews ever at amazingly low data rates, so even though the files are small the results are eye-opening.
Chosen as the industry standard codec for HD-DVD and Blu-ray, and 3GPP (mobile multimedia), H.264 represents the future of next-generation, high-definition DVD playback. As part of its tight integration with Apple’s new Mac OS code-named Tiger, BBC Motion Gallery footage will take advantage of highly advanced search and metadata capabilities that are built into QuickTime 7 via Spotlight searches.
More info here.
MacDailyNews Note: QuickTime 7 is available for Mac OS X v10.3.9 Panther and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger users here. Apple’s QuickTime site states, “QuickTime 7 for Windows coming soon.”
Now if the rest of the media would play follow the leader (BBC) we would all have a better experience while reading and viewing the news.
this is a very big deal… perhaps bbc now will start making more streamed material available in quicktime…
I still have this question: Does apple own the rights to H.264?
Is it their codec, or just a codec they incorporated into their software?
“Is it their codec, or just a codec they incorporated into their software?”
It’s an open standard that Apple has incorporated. They’re probably one of the biggest software-side proponents of this codec.
You can find out more info here: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/technologies/h264/
This is very encouraging. I hadn’t come across the BBC Motion Gallery before, but it’s great to see them gearing up to use H.264. The BBC’s main site at http://www.bbc.co.uk requires RealPlayer and/or Windows Media Player. I really hope that we may now see them adding QuickTime to the mix. IIRC, all PC iTunes users have got QT anyway, and I don’t think they like Real any more than we Mac users do.
Yes, it’s very encouraging. This, however, is far less encouraging:
Older machines to get retooled Windows, Microsoft says
http://story.news.yahoo.com/s/cpress/20050522/ca_pr_on_tc/techbits_windows
The project’s code name? Eiger.
Excuse me while I hurl.
For any Windows users you know,
QT 7 might not be out yet, but VLC is available on Windows, and plays H.264. VLC’s nowhere as good as it is on Mac (and maybe Linux? a Linux user will have to tell me) but it still works.
I have banged on at the Beeb for years about not using Quicktime…
I’d bet on this being a major precedent.
As I’ve said before, this is no longer about using QuickTime, it’s about supporting a standard codec that QuickTime also supports. In the same way that all the PSP videos are QuickTime compatible, so will this be.
With 80-90 percent of ALL streamed video being QuickTime at one point or another (before being converted to real, wmv, etc.) it becomes an even better idea to use a codec (H.264) that is cross platform. One that can play back with more than ONE player app (thus, no longer being locked into “only” windows media or “only” realplayer).