Ben Waggoner, Technology Evangelist at the Microsoft codec team, gave us a taste of 720P and 5.1 in just under 2Mbps using the latest Windows Media codecs. The computer-generated short film Elephants Dream was encoded using Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile and Windows Media Audio 10 Professional along with a script created by Alex Zambelli that allows fine-tuning of encoding parameters not available in the graphical interface of Windows Media Encoder 9 Series. The video is available for download at the Microsoft website.
Although it may not rival the sheer quality of a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD feature film, the video itself looked remarkably sharp with only a slight hint of macroblocking in the runaway scene and another scene near the ending. You’d have to focus your attention on such anomalies to notice them however. I was particularly impressed by how well the codec handled fine details such as power lines in the scenes even with so much action going on. The audio also sounded quite nice, and it’s a great chance to try out your surround sound setup. Being variable-bitrate, it’s not strictly 2Mbps throughout the entire film, but the resulting file size is close to what a constant-bitrate encoding at 2Mbps would be like.
The increased compression efficiency made possible with the script does come at a price however. You would need a more powerful processor to play the video than one without optimizations. Yet, in the age where processing power is cheap and buffering is not so acceptable it is perhaps an excellent tradeoff to make.
If you have time I recommend that you take a look at this video. You may not believe what you see (and hear).
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