10th Anniversary of Quicktime 412
An anonymous reader submitted a story about the 10th anniversary of QuickTime which might not seem like such a big deal unless you set your mental wayback machine to 1991 and remember what we didn't have back then. Bits from Brian Eno and others. Worth reading.
Re:Quicktime and Real Audio are already dead. (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't MPEG4 based on quicktime?
Plus I would hardly put Windows Media in the same catagory as Quick time
QT rocks, an example of APL at it its finest (Score:4, Interesting)
they treated it as multiplatform product, ignrored what the competition was doing, updated it frequently to accomodate new technology and changing hardware/software bases, didn't try to make a fortune off of it, and worked with their user/developer base to make sure they got what they needed to deploy it, and treated it as an "open standard" to a large degree
QT has the most stable and best rendering collection of COCDEC's of any of the video players, and for quality of presentation, QT 3D is still way ahead of the competition...
the number and variety of the CODEC's available for QT show a mature platform that can do just about anything possible with the hardware available
i'm associated with a web design company that has done over 200 commercial web sites, including record artists and film sites....
and 3 years ago everyone of the media companies we did business with always wanted QT, NOW, when we get new "Developer Guidelines", they almost always ask for Real or WindowsMedia...
we've continued to push QT, but just finished a film site that we were ordered to use WindowsMedia "or else"
at this rate, WindowsMedia and REAL will not be leaving much room for a competitive product in the next 18-36 months
Hey Apple, how about QT for LINUX???? can it save the day????
or is QT going to be another "stranded" product???
Birth of Multimedia (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, quicktime allowed the birth of multimedia. The attitudes from the first posters were along the line of "say thank you, and don't forget to kick it as you walk on by"
Of course, if you really like MS Brand Duct Tape, then keep on kicking.
It is sort of like bitching at your grandfather:"I wish you were never born". Which is not exactly bright, on several levels.
Re:An Article With Real Substance^H^H^H^H^H Bullsh (Score:5, Interesting)
I had a QuickTime movie of my rabbits, on my personal homepage in 1995 which, if you had the QT plugin installed, would start playing as soon as it calculated it could reliably play the whole movie without having to pause. The little control bar filled up with gray and then it started playing automatically... very cool.
Considering that the prototype of pro-quality streaming was QuickTime Conferencing [friendsoftime.org] in 1994, allowing n people each to stream video to n-1 friends, I think you've got your chronology turned around a bit.
And I don't know what you mean by "portal functionality" but if you mean what I think, that's pretty trivial :)
Well, that's kind of the point; it wasn't just a codec. At a time when everyone else was doing FLC animation (shudder) or straight-shot MPEGs, Apple envisioned a media format which was extensible and flexible. Its design played well with time. Basically the multimedia revolution has been another case of Apple being the skunkworks R&D department for the entire industry.
Re:QT rocks, an example of APL at it its finest (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, QuickTime doesn't require a reboot nowadays, at least not on Win2K or XP. It is also included on a the CD with a lot of cameras and scanners, which helps, too.
The UI has issues (it deviates too much from Apple's UI guidelines), but is generally cleaner and easier to navigate than either Real or Windows Media Player, IMHO.
What Apple does with QT marketing that's really annoying is the relentless shilling for QT Pro that pops up darn near every time you open a document (I won't get started about how they stiffed those of us who'd bought the Pro version with QT3 and then were stuck with QT5 and the OS X upgrade).
Re:QT rocks, an example of APL at it its finest (Score:3, Interesting)
Go after the content creation market, which they own. It is definitely an uphill battle, but the fact that Apple drives the creative market has often allowed them to force the market to use a cross platform solution; if graphic design was done on Windows, we might all be using a web page format that you can only use in IE.
Pioneer in digital video? What about the Amiga? (Score:3, Interesting)
My familiarity with this field is week, but I acknowledge the need to maintain an accurate history free from marketting hype. It was my understanding that the Amiga with the early VideoToaster cards was the first consumer-targetted machine with video editting capabilities, and that the capabilities of Video Toaster was well beyond anything QT could do for several version.
I couldn't find the exact dates on the Video Toaster inception, in my brief search, but I know the amiga was circa '85. Is it that the Toaster isn't considered a consumer-grade video editting tool, or that it is hardware as opposed to QT, or that it came out after 1991 or that the amiga is simply forgetting in a corner of modern computer history?
VP3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quicktime and Real Audio are already dead. (Score:5, Interesting)
The video you're watching in RealPlayer was at one point a QuickTime file
QuickTime is also much more than just streaming video or Sorenson streams. It handles all kinds of media, and a QuickTime movie is actually a wrapper for multiple media tracks. So you can easily add a MIDI soundtrack (just by cutting and pasting) to a video presentation, playing the lightweight music file through the built-in software synth that supports DownLoadable Sounds (DLS). Then you can layer on a Flash movie for an interface, and a spoken narrative in MP3. You can add transitions that are built-into QuickTime itself. All of these tracks exist within the single wrapper file.
Really, you can't overstate how important QuickTime has been and is now to any kind of computer multimedia.
Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows effort was even found in court to contain stolen QuickTime code. The didn't just copy the architecture, they also used Apple code. It's not surprising, but it's just symbolic of how much more of a leader Apple has been on this front.
Quicktime for Java exists (Score:2, Interesting)
2- Quicktime for Java is available from the regular quicktime installer. Go install the thing and write a movie player on Linux., or for your other java-enabled portables. I don't know what you're complaining about!
3- Quicktime is the basis of the next mpeg standard precicely because it is widely available and a great architecture for combining all kinds of different media. It is robust and scalable (very tiny streams all the way to HDTV). This is not a closed platform, and will only become more open when mpeg4 is finalized. Sorrensen is licensed, but there are just as many other small-compression formats you can get for free that plug-in to the QT architecture just as well.
4- I use different operating systems for different things. Unix has traditionally been great for server things, Macs for graphics and multimedia, and Windows has been good for keeping Tech Support staff, Security Experts and Lawyers gainfully employed. I am so happy under MacOS X to have a Unix server AND Quicktime AND a decent GUI. I'm not saying it's better for anybody else, but I really like it. If I didn't like it, or I wanted to continue to use other OSes as well, or thought Apple charged too much for hardware, I wouldn't be running it-- but I also wouldn't be complaining that they should give it all away for free.
-The Minister of Quicktime
Re:typical rewriting of history (Score:2, Interesting)
The point of my MNG comment was rhetorical, and properly expanded/disambiguated would have been soomething like this:
"What suitable replacement options do you have for the Quicktime architecture? MNG?"
Yes, MNG has it's place, and will I'm sure be supported as an import, track, and export media type within Quicktime. We currently have PNG support everywhere that counts, it's not much of a leap. My point was that all the non-Quicktime options out there are primarily distribution formats/codecs, not the all-encompassing media architecture that Quicktime provides. Even if you were wanting to end up with an MNG file there would be benefits to using Quicktime to produce it - namely, the application support and integration of multiple media types available on Mac OS and Windows. Yes, if you just have a bunch of still frames to merge into an MNG this is trivial - but if you want to produce video in an NLE with content coming from a variety of sources, Quicktime is the foundation that makes this happen.
Cheers,
BB
Re:Hypercard? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hypercard is what I used to learn how to program. I did some stuff with BASIC on an Apple][e and C/64 before that, but it never amounted to much.
Hypercard, on the other hand, let you do some seriously cool stuff. Once I got into programming Hypercard it opened up a whole universe to me. It had an API (RCMD) that allowed you to hook C or Pascal programs in, which got me into C, and the rest is history :)
If the rumours of Apple bringing it back are true, then I will be really happy. I can't think of a better way to get kids into programming.
Confucious says ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I found this great quote two days ago (thank you fortune()!).
Guess "Windows Media" sells ...
It's sad, I can play Real and Windows Media under Linux, but can't get Quicktime 5 trailers to work. (Note the '5' - they changed the codec.)