Playing Moonlights H.264 on Mac

[cecco]

I'm really impressed by the quality, file size and encoding speed of Moonlights H.264 OneClick Compressor. And the files play fine with Moonlights Multimedia Player, even several in parallel on an Athlon 2 GHz.

Video quality is highly subjective, IMHO file size is 4 to 5 times smaller with H.264 than with mpeg2 for nearly identical quality.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to play them on Mac OS X (G4 Dual 800). Mplayer and VLC seem to recognise the format, but crash after a few seconds.

Does anyone know of a working H.264 player for OS X. Or do we have to wait for QuickTime7 and hope it can play H.264 stuff created by Non-Apple encoders like the one from Moonlight.

Greetings

Cecco

[celtic_druid]

mplayer and VLC should work fine although they would need to be recent versions as libavcodec's h264 decoding has been updated quite a bit lately. Guess the container may be a problem as I believe moonlight outputs to TS.

If you like Moonlight you really should check out x264 or Nero for h.264/AVC encoding.

[cecco]

If you like Moonlight you really should check out x264 or Nero for h.264/AVC encoding.

Tried Nero and it gives comparable results to Moonlight, but on my tests, Nero takes several times longer for encoding.

Its a little bit strange, that Nero AVC files play with the Nero player but not with Moonlight player, while Moonlight H.264 files play with the Moonlight player but not with the Nero player.

And non of the play with mplayer and VLC on Mac OS X

Don't know about x264. Looks to be just a library.

Cecco

[celtic_druid]

It is a library which comes with a simple commandline front end and a VFW frontend. The library can also be used with mencoder.

VLC tend to not update libavcodec that often.
What were the dates of the mplayer/VLC builds that you tested?

Moonlight uses mp2 for audio? At least with Nero you can use aac audio which should leave more room for video.

I really find it hard to believe that Moonlights quality is comparible to Nero's. After all it is only 1 pass isn't it?

[cecco]

VLC tend to not update libavcodec that often.
What were the dates of the mplayer/VLC builds that you tested?

Today I tried the the last nightly snapshot from Feb 26. It has improved indeed, but I would call H.264 support still not working.

It doesn't play the Nero H.264 at all.
It plays a few seconds of the Mooonlight H.264 then the video stops, while audio still playing and after 5 seconds, VLC recognizes the video/audio out of sync and complaints about it, suspecting the CPU being too slow. I doubt my Dual 800 G4 has not enough power to play H.264, especially, as this error occur even with low bandwith H.264 files. I think VLC has problems decoding Moonlights H.264.

Moonlight uses mp2 for audio? At least with Nero you can use aac audio which should leave more room for video.

VLC tells me mpga as audio codec.

I really find it hard to believe that Moonlights quality is comparible to Nero's. After all it is only 1 pass isn't it?

It must be 1 pass, otherwise it couldn't encode in realtime on fast CPUs.

Here are some tests I've made:

I've encoded a 41 second clip in Nero:

Standard AVC, 2 Pass: 8:35 min
Standard AVC, 1 Pass: 4:24 min
Standad AVC, 1 Pass, all options deactivated: 1:27

Moonlight default: 1:27 (finished after about 1 minute but Moonlight seems to clean some tempfiles afterwards).

I would say Moonlight's quality is very close to Nero 2 Pass. It is definitely ways better than the Nero 1:27 encoding.

I'll suggest you download their demo and see yourself.

Would be nice if you post your findings.

Cecco