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The point about sorenson video not being licensed is tragic, but in case you didn't know, Sorenson doesn't even measure up to DivX. Despite its popularity, DivX is not a very good codec, playing it on macs is barely possible due to microsoft crippling, and there is no encoding option.

Fortunately, besides the new Sorenson 3 codec which should be improved, and an MPEG4 codec which should become available sometime soon for QT5, there are also several 3rd party codecs coming out which have much better performance. On2's VP3 codec is already available for multiple platforms, and there VP4 codec is due soon. VP3 is an excellent codec. Better yet, the folks who made the mac DivX player are now working on their own codec called 3ivx, which so far is already more advanced than many commercial codecs. They even are working on the OpenQuicktime project, which is meant for all *nix environments, and are developing the codec for as many platforms as they can, even the PS2! Beyond that there is also Project Mayo's open source OpenDivX, FastVDO's Allstream technology, and probably dozens of others.

Quicktime is the best multimedia file architecture which unfortunately has been hampered by slow codecs and a late start to streaming media. But don't assume sorenson is the only codec out there.

cryptochrome