needing less CPU to play back than any other commercially viable codec.
What do you expect from a codec that's closer to the previous MPEG-4 ASP generation (e.g. Divx, Xvid) than H.264?
VC1 is remarkably good, only just recently challenged by H.264 encoding's most recent optimizations.
Recently challenged when? Only right after Blu-ray was introduced VC-1 was somewhat better than H.264 because the VC-1 encoder implementation was better than any of the "pro encoders" that the studios used.
not to mention most every consumer device and set top box
iPods, iPhones? Also I have never seen a real-world VC-1 deployment on an STB. Virtual all of said consumer devices also play H.264 video.
It was only Microsoft's lobbying that led to VC-1 getting accepted in Blu-ray and (on paper but not in reality) in DVB. Even Microsoft have pretty much given up on it; H.264 is in Silverlight, IE9 and Expression Encoder 3 has its own H.264 encoder.
What do you expect from a codec that's closer to the previous MPEG-4 ASP generation (e.g. Divx, Xvid) than H.264?
VC1 is remarkably good, only just recently challenged by H.264 encoding's most recent optimizations.
Recently challenged when? Only right after Blu-ray was introduced VC-1 was somewhat better than H.264 because the VC-1 encoder implementation was better than any of the "pro encoders" that the studios used.
http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/website/compare.html also and there are plenty of PSNR/SSIM measurements online which show H.264 is vastly better than VC-1.
not to mention most every consumer device and set top box
iPods, iPhones? Also I have never seen a real-world VC-1 deployment on an STB. Virtual all of said consumer devices also play H.264 video.
It was only Microsoft's lobbying that led to VC-1 getting accepted in Blu-ray and (on paper but not in reality) in DVB. Even Microsoft have pretty much given up on it; H.264 is in Silverlight, IE9 and Expression Encoder 3 has its own H.264 encoder.