Slashdot Mirror

Indeed a good question to ask before purchasing anything...

And remember that not all learners are /. readers...or are yours? And will all of them be? I say this because someone suggested IRC for example. I wouldn't want to use IRC for an average distance learner...and think of the requirements you just layed on.

Distance learning has usually been a failure, and probably will be until technology changes drastically (like really fast broadband access in all the students' homes).

There's some truth to this, but it's also a bad generalization. All teaching/learning involves an instructor, resources (texts etc.), tools for delivery (your voice, a microphone, the web etc.), and an objective. I have had correspondence courses that I deemed useless. My 1,000 student section of history 202 was pitiful while I learned a great deal out of the independent study 201 course where I read at my own pace and did everything correspondence. Teaching and learning is about leveraging the tools and resources to meet your objectives. In some cases, clear objectives lack...and no matter what tools you use, you're screwed! Oh...and then there's learner motivation...which can be killed by too-hard-to-use technology/delivery systems, boring professors, dull material, immaturity etc. Hence the reason technology alone or 'distance learning' alone shouldn't be blamed. Check this out.

Anyway...technologies...especially for Linux?

• WebCT - A course development, delivery and management server. Linux version available
• Sorenson - Desktop video conferencing...Sorry, No Linx though.
• Mimio - Whiteboards etc. Linux...Dunno
• W3C - They do web stuff

Galego

Thanks for the info. Some of the relevant information is here. The Sorenson codec seems to use the same methodology as MPEG-1, with some slight detail differences. It would be very interesting to see some experimental results though. It seems a lot of companies are deliberately choosing proprietary codecs, even though MPEG-1 is much better (the early AVI and QuickTime codecs for example, and maybe even the later codecs as well), so I think some suspicion is healthy. For example, I think Sorenson is only available for QuickTime and not AVI, thus Apple can leverage this proprietary codec to use their player, and push the QuickTime name. Wasn't some version of the Star Wars trailer only available as Sorenson/QuickTime?

I think Apple is already thinking about how to get QT on other platforms (besides Mac OS and Windows). I think their answer will be QuickTime for Java. With QT 4.1, Java applets can now make calls to the QuickTime sub-system. I don't know how much of the API is available through Java, but this will most likely be how Apple achieves true cross-platform support. Check out the QuickTime for Java book for more info..

As to Apple having a QT player with an X (as in X Window, not Mac OS X) interface floating around, that is very unlikely. Apple's GUI for OS X will be there own vector based Quartz. Apple will not officially be supporting X Windows on Mac OS X (although John Carmak has ported XFree86 to Mac OS X).

One last thing, the Sorenson codec is not Apple's to Open Source, it is licensed from a third-party, as are many parts of QuickTime. This of course, would be a major hinderance to Open Sourcing QuickTime.

I have a feeling that the problem lies more with Sorenson than with Apple. Sorenson regards their product as proprietary and thus not open source. Though not as user grumpy a company as Heuris, they extract a fair amount of cash out of you to encode using it. Its the best on the block for video of this sort so I guess I can't blame them.

But where is the free production platform? Does Quicktime have a free tool to generate the live streams?

For live streaming, you can use Sorenson's Broadcaster with or without Darwin Streaming Server (you can use the server to reflect a multicast so folks can access streams over the internet). The product page is at http://www.s-vision.com/produ cts/SorensonBroadcaster/.

To set up movies, music files, etc. on your server, you can use Apple's $30 QuickTime Pro (a reg# upgrade to the free download). This will allow you to export media into hinted format for streaming.

-Dave

There is a new Star Wars trailer that has been recently released and it uses the currently unsupported Sorenson Video codec. I have contacted Sorenson about licensing their codec. They responded that Apple won't allow them to license it to others. You may want to nicely send a single email message to Sorenson and Apple asking about unix and/or xanim support for the Sorenson video codec.

For the record, I would gladly add support for Sorenson if allowed to.

I find it sad how disingenuous and clue-free Apple continues to be. They lobby heavily to get QuickTime accepted as an Internet standard, then refuse to allow non-Mac/Win folks access. This is consistent with their recent history. Bundled browser: Microsoft. Bundled Java: Microsoft.

One would almost think Microsoft had given them a large quantity of money... Naww! ;-)

I emailed Apple and Sorenson about working with Mark Podlipec (Xanim's creator) and below is the email I got back.

If we all email them maybe they will get a clue.
For reference, Xanim's home page (and mirrors)
http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/home.html
http://smurfland.cit.buffalo.edu/xanim/home.html
http://xanim.resnet.gatech.edu/home.html


Hello,

You're receiving this note because you asked for QuickTime for Linux, QuickTime for UNIX, or QuickTime for Amiga.

QuickTime is available for Mac OS http://www.apple.com/macos, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4. The next platform to be supported will be Mac OS X http://www.apple.com/macosx (including Mac OS X Server), which is Mach/BSD-based.

If you're interested in QuickTime for platforms other than Mac or Windows, contact your platform vendor and let them know that you would like them to license QuickTime from Apple.

If you're interested in QuickTime as it relates to servers, be sure to check out the standards-based Darwin streaming server project http://publicsource.apple.com (which works with any standards-based streaming media client).

Thank you,

--
Charles Wiltgen
QuickTime Technology Manager
Worldwide Developer Relations Apple Computer, Inc. "Don't compromise. Use QuickTime."
http://www.apple.com/quicktime
http://www.QuickTimeFAQ.org

QuickTime 4: The first standards-based architecture for networked media.
Recognized as the industry standard for Macintosh and Windows since 1991.

The codec does not belong to Apple. The license it from Sorenson. If you want to, you can call up Sorenson and license it too. Go for it. As to "buy it out and pretend it's free", that's Microsoft's strategy. Apple didn't buy Quicktime, it invented it. Apple did buy NeXT, but there was no streaming server in NeXT.

Unfortunately Sorenson will not allow their codec to be licensed or ported for an OS in which Apple has not made available a QuickTime client. This includes Linux.

I found this hard to believe but Norman Doyle normd@s-vision.com, director of software development at Sorenson confirmed it on the public QuickTime-Talk list (QuickTime-Talk Digest V1 #138, June 15 1999), http://www.lists.apple.com/quicktime -talk.html.

Quoting Norman:

Apple and Sorenson Vision currently have a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch your back" relationship. It's beneficial for both companies but also to many of you. We are very supportive of QuickTime and will only port our codec to those systems that are supported by QuickTime

For more background on this see Mark Podlipec's comments on his attempts to get the sorenson codec ported to Xamim http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/

Apple seems completely uniterested in allowing QuickTime to be ported to Linux or other free nixes. Charles Wiltgen the QuickTime Technology Manager cwiltgen@apple.com is seemingly completely unconvinced of any benefit to Apple of allowing a QuickTime client on Linux. His standard response to the question about a Linux client on the quicktime-talk list is quoted below:

Linux is a fine topic for this list if it involves serving
QuickTime movies. Otherwise, it's not.

If QuickTime on other platforms is critical to you, let your
platform vendor know that you need them to license QuickTime --
refer them to me, and I'll hook them up with the the Apple people
they'll need to talk to.

If you have more thoughts on the subject, please take it to a
different forum, or email me privately.

See: QuickTime-Talk Digest V1 #133, June 12 1999

If you've got a well reasoned response about why it is in Apple's interest to make or allow a QuickTime client for Linux please write to Charles. I'd base it on Linux desktops eating away MS share instead of Apple's.

I didn't look for specific addresses, but the Sorenson site appears to be at http://www.s-vision.com/.

Yes, that's fine if I wanted to know how a quicktime file is structured, but it has no technical details or algorithms to reproduce the codecs. With this information, I could build a mean-ass QT file parser, but I wouldn't know how to decode the infomation contained in it. Those codecs are closly guarded corporate secrets. I'm sure that Qualcomm, Apple, Sorenson and other will let you look at them, if you gave them a few million bucks.. :-)

You can use the information in that and other publicly-available documents to start reimplementing the QuickTime API. Once you have the right portions of the QuickTime API reimplemented you can call Sorenson and Qualcomm and everyone else and say "Hey, wanna port your CODEC to Linux? It'll be simple if you already have it working with QuickTime!"

This does mean that a lot of CODECs would probably be distributed as closed-source shared libraries, but to me that's not a big deal at all. And all but the most unreasonable Open Source purists will prefer such a situation to having no advanced CODECs.

Really, I don't see why Sorenson or Qualcomm or Intel or anyone else would object to porting their CODEC if it wasn't too much work. (Particularly if Linux starts to gain significant desktop share.) But right now, there's no single solid multimedia target at all for Linux, so telling Sorenson that you want their CODEC on Linux would likely just garner you a confused look.

(Incidentally, this same issue applied to widget sets and window managers is likely holding up a lot of commercial application development. Commercial developers with Mac and Windows products don't want to decide which of { Qt, GTK, Athena, Motif, GNUstep, ... } to use for their product. We want a single API for building applications with graphical human interfaces, and we want all of those applications to look and behave the same. In other words, we want a solid target.)

The company I work for (Sorenson Vision Inc.) is releasing a kick-ass video conferencing system for the MS-Windows platform in April. You can read about it at this site.

It may be the nicest video conferencing system available when it comes out. Unfortunately, the company has no current plans for ports to any other platform because they don't see the economic feasibility of doing so.

If you've used the Sorenson plugin for QuickTime you know the technology is superior to most video compression codecs available so it would be very cool if they would support the Linux movement in some fashion.