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I strongly think it's really unfair to deaf community if they cap it. Deaf people now use videoconference type of relay service to communicate with the world using videophone similiar to Dlink's i2eye. Check this link below to explain why it is a problem. The blogger in this link is deaf as well as I am and having broadband connection has been one of the greatest technological achievement for us deaf people because it allows us to be independent and better access to communication.

http://jarednevans.typepad.com/blog/2008/01/time-warner-cus.html

Here are an example of video relay service. http://www.sorenson.com/ That company is one of many company that provice service to deaf and hard of hearing community.

Since internet came into being, accessibility for the deaf has improved tremendously (Sidekick, Blackberry, videophone, videorelay,WWW,and etc etc) basically we deaf finally have equal access to information easily as hearing counterpart.

So Time Warner's plan to cap broadwidth will seriously offend deaf community (5gb/a month bandwidth is equal 3.5 hrs of video phone a month). I wouldn't be surprised if FCC is investigating this.

(I think i need to go take class to learn how to write better .....LOL )

Get that deaf finger out of your hearing ear! Deaf makes millions of video calls every day.

Check out the following Video phones immediately available today:

http://www.sorenson.com/
http://www.packet8.net/about/video.asp

Not to mention Gnumeeting, Netmeeting, and a bunch of other H.323/Video applications.

Any tax on our personal video communication is an unfair one-sided tax to a specific group of people, especially if hearing people can already communicate MUCH cheaper (less than 10 cents per minutes) than deaf people can (tax at a more per minutes or more unfairly by bandwidth).

Thus, when H.264 encoders become availible

They've been available for some time...

NeroDigital
x264
VideoSoft
Moonlight
Sorenson
Reference encoder

And those are just off the top of my head.

"WMP support" is already available as there are several directshow splitters and decoders around. VideoLAN's support is almost complete, the only essential things it lacks are deblocking for b-frames and the new high profile stuff.

Sorenson Sparkhttp://www.sorenson.com/solutions/prod/comp_w in.php/ is a heck of a little codec for small resolution streamable content. The software is available for both Windows and Mac and the compression suite allows you to put video directly into a flash based media player for streaming. Is this an open codec in the spirit of open software? not on your life. but it delivers small video in small bandwidth with really nice quality. If handling streaming bandwidth doesn't float your fancy you can additionally offer the flash file for download for offline viewing in any modern browser. If *I* was the one downloading the file I wouldn't be too happy about that but if I were someone who just wanted to view it I'd be very happy.

Sorenson makes an awesome product called 'Squeeze' that compresses video files (Quicktime/AVI/etc.) into flash Video (MUCH better than you will on your own). I recently compressed a 20mb Quicktime trailer to a 8mb one with minimal to no loss of quality. The best thing about Flash Video is that Flash has a higher penetration rate than any other plug-in and does away with cross-platform compatability issues.

You're right and you're wrong. Quicktime is not a compression format. It's a file container architecture. Sorenson is a non-standard compression format. Sorenson looks beautiful and compresses well, but it is not widely supported.

I bet you a dollar that if I put a quicktime file encoded to MP4 up on a website, and you viewed it with any player that supports MP4, you wouldn't know it was a quicktime file. If you opened the file in a text editor and looked at the header, you might figure out. But if you've played many MP4 files, chances are that some of them were encoded using quicktime as the architecture, and you never knew it.

The company that created the Sorenson codec makes a really great compression product called Sorenson Squeeze. There is both a windows and a mac version, unfortunately no linux version. It compresses video files into a huge range of codecs, including .wmv and MP4.

Personally, I'd use MP4.

I see an apparent confusion in the force. We should differentiate between the player (the Quicktime player from Apple) and the file format known as Quicktime. The Apple Quicktime player is indeed nagware. But as other posters have already noted, there are non-nagging players available, whose legality may or may not be on the gray side. Here it's probably also important to differentiate between the Quicktime file format (the container) and the different Quicktime codecs (the content). For example, a Quicktime file can contain the Sorenson video codec made (in)famous by the trailers you download from Apple.com or the so-called Motion JPEG (M-JPEG) codec supported by many older digital camcorders before the advent of MPEG 4 (yet another QT-embeddable codec). The Sorenson codec has since been reverse-engineered by the terribly underrated FFmpeg project, and non-Windows lusers can now view such Quicktime movie without being nagged (hearing them may still be a problem though).

I've found Cleaner to be somewhat less userfriendly and stable than Sorenson Squeeze - Squeeze also costs about $100 less. Its does realplayer, quicktime, mpeg files as well as flash SWF and FLV files which are good for cross platform no brainer plays-in-a-window video files. You can also set it up as a watchfolder renderer, so all you have to do is drop new videos into a watched folder and it will automatically render all your set formats.

I see a lot of suggestions here for torrents, divx, etc which are not as wide spread and userfriendly as WMV / QT / FLASH /MPEG options. your best bet is probably to provide multiple format options to hit the widest audience, which can be batch rendered with Cleaner or Squeeze.

What are you talking about? H.264 (aka AVC) is an open standard. Apple is not the only one who implents this standard. In fact, Apple is quite slow. Here's a short list of available encoders:
Sorenson Squeeze 4, MainConcept H.264 Encoder, Nero Digital AVC, Hdot264, x264, etc....

And when you look how bad the quality of Apple's MPEG-4 ASP is (compared to XviD, DivX,...), I wouldn't bet that Apple AVC will be so great either.
If you want to encode on Mac I guess that Sorenson Squeeze 4 is currently the best sollution. According to the latest codec comparison on Doom9.net NeroDigital AVC is the best codec (Sorenson was not tested).

RTFM... Quicktime is a container format, NOT a codec. If you have a gripe, send it to these guys...

They did give back...all the code changes they've made they've submitted back to the KHTML community.

And you can already play quicktime movies on Linux, just not the ones that use certain third-party codecs.

Really, in the big picture, it'd be nice to see more companies adopting open source to the level that Apple has...

Actually, QuickTime usually uses the best codec, which is Sorenson.

This is just me, but you'd probably have more sucess complaining to Sorenson about that, if you think you can convince them that 1)There are enough content creators on Linux that they will sell enough copies of Sorenson Video 3 Pro to recoup their porting costs or 2)Content creators feel that there are enough content consumers on Linux that they feel support for the platform is important. You could just try to get Apple to fully implement QuickTime on Linux, if you think you can convince them of #2 above.

How about Aqua themes?

Why the hell do you feel that you have the right to Apple's art? Source code is one thing, pixmaps are another thing entirely. If someone copied art that my design team had spent many long hours designing, I would go after them a lot harder than Apple did.

How is Apple helping me again?

By employing dozens of programmers who work on open source code, perhaps? By building and open source steaming media server that you can run on your favorite OS? By having, "one of the biggest gcc compiler design teams in the world" and giving all that code back?

If Sorenson codec is an issue, lets all send mail to Sorenson Labs and ask them to support Linux. At the least, release a DLL for one of the players.

Apple has released the specs for almost every aspect of the Quicktime (.mov) standard. They rarely write their own codecs though.

The Sorenson codec is owned by Sorenson and Apple pays for it.

Apple has released the specs for almost every aspect of the Quicktime (.mov) standard. They rarely write their own codecs though.

The Sorenson codec is owned by Sorenson and Apple pays for it. If you want to get a legal player for a non-Win/Mac platform someone will either have to
1. reverse engineer the codec(legally questionable and hard)
2. write a wrapper that uses another OSs Code (crossover does this)
3. legally licence the code and release a player (anyone?)
4. actually get sorsen to let people have their source(or detailed specs) somehow.

the best thing to do is just start using a codec that already lets people have their source and is on par with the best VP3

"According to Mark Podlipec's XAnim site (May 10, 1999), he contacted Sorenson Vision to find out if he could license Sorenson Video for incorporation in the XAnim Unix X11 animation, audio, and video player. According to his Web site, Sorenson replied that Apple will not allow Sorenson to license Sorenson Video to others."

their continuing refusal to open the Sorensen codec

Sorenson is working on a Mpeg-4 codec. I've seen beta versions floating around. I believe that this announcement means one of two things:

1. Sorenson Mpeg-4 will be bundled with Quicktime, which is to be expected. Apple will probably make a big deal of it. This won't help Linux one bit as the codec will still be proprietary.
2. Apple will adapt Quicktime so that it will easily work with codecs that follow one of the ISO MPEG-4 profile codec definitions. This is also to be expected. Mpeg-4 will allow you to use the same codec with any video-architecture that supports Mpeg-4 (Quicktime, WMP, Real, etc).
Take your pick.

Here's a link: 9 januari, behold the beta of Sorenson Mpeg-4

PS. Could someone mod down lordpixel, his sensible post doesn't fit it with the other posts: "F*ck Apple, why can't I play Quicktime trailers? It's a conspiracy."
PS2. 90% of the posts can be answered with this: "complain with Sorenson to port the codec to Linux".
PS3. This topic is about Quicktime. Not Linux.

The sorenson codec is not developed by apple, it is created by the sorenson media company. I don't think it is fair to blame apple for not releasing the sorenson codec to Linux, it is not theirs to port.

Sorenson is seperate company from Apple. Apple licensed the Sorenson codec for QuickTime.
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And it is just one word: Sorensen.

Dumbass! Sorenson != Apple. Sorenson is a codec made by an entirely different company that happens to be popular with Apple's (completely open, BTW) Quicktime format. Apple has no control over the openness of Sorenson's codec.

There are plenty of reasons to bash Apple (you can start with their patent fiascos), but Sorenson's proprietary video compression algorithm isn't one of them.
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You can ask Apple all you want, but it is Sorenson that would actually have to do the work, so it might be more prudent to ask Sorenson.

I bought Sorenson Broadcaster and used QTSS to deliver live AUDIO of our universities athletic events. A few month's later, the President of the U.S. picked our campus to deliver one of his last major addresses. HAD to try a video webcast. It came off well, with reports from across the country reporting it worked great.

Real offers a free server, but only to get you hooked. Once you become successful, you'll have to purchase expensive licenses.

QuickTime Player is a great choice for users of either major platform. It has a super-easy installer. As already mentioned, the QTSS is free in various incarnations.

Keep in mind that streaming LIVE is different from streaming archived events. You'll be using RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) instead of HTTP. That can cause problems for people behind firewalls that aren't configured to let the stream in.

I highly recommend "QuickTime for the Web". Here's a sample chapter from Apple's site.

Broadcaster is great and you can download a fully functional 30 day demo. I swear, if you want to do live video, you really should get a FireWire equipped Mac, plug in your video camera and run Sorenson Broadcaster. If you want to improve on reality, play with the free copy of iMovie to create your archive files. You would have to be insane to spend money for the hardware and software necessary to do the same stuff on another platform.

Curious George.

Streaming Server does not do encoding, it's just an RTSP server. You're gonna need an encoding platform that can do RTP broadcasting in addition.

You're choices for these are VIC(open source), Sorenson Broadcaster, and Sorenson+LiveICE

Note that sorenson alone can only do H263 in realtime on a Mac which is the same as Vic, but LiveICE is supposed to actually do the sorenson codec (although it will cost you).

Darwin Streaming Server is the free and open source version of QuickTime Streaming Server. It runs on FreeBSD, WinNT, Solaris, RedHat and Mac OS X Server. To do real-time encoding, add Sorenson Broadcaster. It's not free, but it's only $199 no matter how many streams you want to serve. You'll need a fast Mac to run it.

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I don't know if any of you have seen this, but Sorenson is making their own MPEG4 codec. I was able to talk to the guys while at the MacWorld convention, and they said they are basing it off of the MPEG4 standard, but adding their own benefits. It WILL play on all existing MPEG4 players, so it looks like Linux will finally be able to play Sorenson files.

Unfortunatly, no open-sorenson from Apple.

Because Apple doesn't own sorenson, they just use it in Quicktime. Sorenson is actually owned by Sorenson Media, Inc.

It doesn't matter how open Apple feels, you need to convince Sorenson Media itself that you want it.

On to the Off-Topic rant, while I understand there is some animosity towards Quicktime for not being distributed on Linux, I really have to say it's a great technology. Both WMP and Real lock you into using their own software, litigate like mad whenever anyone else decodes their own formats, etc, on and on...

Quicktime supports a huge number of formats (and for $30, lets you encode many of them, which is a real deal!), many of which are supported by Real and WMP through the Quicktime install itself. I also find the Player application is just so much nicer to use than either WMP or Real. Your not bombarded with adds, and while some people (mostly MacOS User Interface advocates) decry the interface, it is MUCH less offensive than either Real or WMP, especially with the improvments made in the upcoming Quicktime 5.

Sorenson Media, makers of the eponymous proprietary video codec that is included in recent versions of QuickTime. A lot of alternative OS users are annoyed that there's no version of Sorenson for their favorite platform.

'When is Quicktime player components going to be open sourced?'

Jesus, hasn't this issue died yet? how many times does one have to keep posting the same thing to slashdot before people get it?

one more time: Apple very little control over getting Quicktime to work under Linux!! in fact, though not "opensource," Quicktime is already a well-published standard. the issue is that the popular CODECS for Quicktime aren't available on Linux. so if you have a problem with that, talk to Sorenson, who make the most common Quicktime CODEC.