Gepetto wrote:OS X has native support for H264 (I don't know specifically about the lossless mode, but I've never heard otherwise) and MP4, so it should work.
Last I checked, the native support Apple has given for H.264 - in reference to Quicktime, anyway - wasn't nearly as complete as ffdshow or CoreAVC support is. For instance, I don't believe High Profile was supported at all, and Main Profile was severely limited if it was even supported at all. As it stood, the early H.264-encoded trailers from the Quicktime site were made with a bastardized version of Baseline Profile that supported B-frames.
In general reference, AMVs and fansubs are more than likely to overwhelmingly make use of High Profile because of the massive compression gains. I'm sure Lossless mode is in the same boat, so it would be necessary for Apple to have updated their support.
Gepetto wrote:Qyot27 wrote:That's primarily because of the B-frames and Reference frames.
Are you sure? MPEG-4 ASP has those as well, and it works well in AVI. (even though with a much smaller complexity)
Sorry for the stupid questions, but I have absolutely no in-depth knowledge about containers.
It's still a rather hacky solution to force ASP into AVI specifically because of the B-frames - since AVI doesn't support B-frames, the DivX and XviD teams hacked them in, albeit in differing ways (this is where the Packed Bitstream option comes from, as well as the source of the B-frame decoder lag error message/legacy initial black frame in XviD-based ASP encodes in AVI). There really isn't anything else that comes to mind which I think would affect it, except maybe the GMC warp points, but I know next-to-nothing about that feature.
H.264 allows a heck of a lot more B-frames and Reference frames than ASP does, though, and that's where the shit hits the fan when trying to stuff it into AVI, as the other options (discounting things that work on Reference and B-frames, like Mixed refs and the B-pyramid, which
really should not be done in AVI). It requires even worse hacks and because AVI isn't equipped to handle it, it keels over and you get sync problems. To remedy the problem and make H.264 function without sync problems, the solution is not to use B-frames or Reference frames (or at least limit their usage to 1 or 2 as one would with XviD's VFW encoder, although that will still eventually introduce the lagging problem as well) and especially not Mixed refs or the B-pyramid, but in doing so it seriously affects the ability of H.264 to compress as well as it can - even if the resulting quality is still better than a comparably-sized ASP encode.