Hello,
I am new to this forum and I might not be posting under the proper section, I will gladly correct myself if it's the case and my appologies to those it may affect.
I started using HAP with my media servers (Coolux and watchout) which run under the windows platform. I have a few remarks and concerns regarding this codec and wanted to share with the team:
-Quality: exceptionnal, I am very impressed with the result, especially on the performance side. However I found a case where HAP doesn't lead to good result and it is easy to repropduce. Whenever there is dithering in a file HAP reverts it to banding, sometimes it is pretty severe.
-Container: .mov on the Mac side of thing is a good container but on the Windows side it is another story, quicktime is not multithreaded and it quickly becomes the issue when playing several quicktime files ultimately limiting the amount of possible concurent files.
-Encoding: using quicktime 7 export feature works but it is clunky and there are no batch possibilities. Since HAP is open source I was wondering if it could one day inherit its own extension, .hap for example, and if an ffmpeg library was planned or could be a possibility. FFMPEG works on all platform, it very fast, convenient and easy to include in custom apps. I currently have scripts hooked to my right click menu that let me encode using presets by right-clicking a file and choosing the encode type, it stores the encoded file right alongside the original one with a suffix clearly indicating it is the encoded file. I highly prefer that to opening an app, configuring the encoder output folder and so on and so forth.
-4k: 4k files are huge, far bigger than 4x HD; if I split a 4k file in 4x HD file, each file will weight 90MB for example but if I encode it in 4k the file will be 21GB, quite the difference. I wouldn't mind huge but I do mind being able to play 32 concurent HD HAP file but only 2 4k HAP files, quick math tell me I should be able to play 8 of them, not 2.
Other than that, trying to encode in HAPQ crashes all our windows machines, not our Macs, considering our media servers are on Windows it would be nice to encode in HAPQ from there.
That being said great job, HAP is the format I have been wanting all these years. Transparency, GPU decoding, very high quality fluid instant playback... love it.
Thanks for your time and looking forward to the answers.
regards