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Petition Apple for Linux QuickTime
Evan Vetere writes "Apple is being petitioned to release a QuickTime client for Linux." Apple has been babystepping around Open Source for awhile now, but multimedia is one area where the veil of secrecy is extremely opaque: the codecs that drive video display and streaming are almost always proprietary. It would be great if apple would lead the way towards fair open standards by releasing an Open Source Quicktime client for Linux. It would do a world of good towards getting it accepted as a standard.
i think the idea of the petition is great, i support it, i signed it. but i see what i think is a real problem when i was skimming through the signatures. there are a lot of posts that point out reasons that aren't really advantageous to Apple *at all*. this is understandable, but why should Apple care that not having QuickTime is what's keeping you from begin able to ditch Windows? you're not ditching Windows for MacOS, are you? or asking them to support other BSDs (other than MacOS X, that is), or Solaris, or BeOS.. why should they?
.mov media format sucks ass."
:)"
i think they should, but what i'm getting at is that a lot of these comments actually seem to emphasize things that would (IMO) encourage Apple to *not* make QuickTime for Linux..
there also seem a fairly high number of pretty derogatory posts and posts that if were working for Apple, i would read and think "what a bunch of jerks, screw them."
things like..
"Or, you could just exclude millions of users from your worthless, overhyped video system."
or...
"Quicktime on Linux would be nice, even thoug the
uh huh, thanks. or...
"Im going LINUX..........
................follow or perish"
what incentive. how about...
"I'm not too fond of Apple or Mac OS... ugh, user-friendlyness, get it off me!
how does saying, "i don't like you, but do a lot of stuff for me anyway" make sense?
then there's a number of people who pointed out that they switched to PC's from Mac and they miss QuickTime. i'm sorry, but i can't see a lot of sense in supporting the people who ditched you for your competitors..
really people, haven't you ever heard that you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you? same thing goes for the hand that you're asking for food from.
I don't want a QT client from apple. When Apple writes its own clients, they're always MacOS-ish, regardless of the underlying architecture, and they never let you do some of the tricks you need to do.
Um... such as... what? I have no idea of anything I've ever "needed" to do in QuickTime that the client ever kept me from doing.
And, there isn't a real reason to have a different client for QT and AVI and MPEG.
Agreed. However, QuickTime supports both AVI and MPEG anyway, so your point is moot. I've never found Xanim's MPEG playback to be all that great anyway; I use it for AVI but I've moved to SMPEG-based stuff for MPEG playback. So I'd love to see QuickTime ported so I could get back to one program for all of them again.
What I want to see from Apple is a QuickTime codec library.
QuickTime is NOT a codec. How many times do people have to be told that? QuickTime is nothing more than a file format. One which, I might add, is already supported under several libraries. Codecs are another matter entirely. Take Sorenson, for example. It's not a file format. Theoretically, barring the fact that there is no software to do this, you could compress an AVI with Sorenson, if you really wanted to.
MPEG is both a file format and a codec. I never saw this as much of a Good Thing. But MPEG4 drops that and uses the QuickTime file format, leaving the codec as pure MPEG.
If I'm using the LiViD player for MPEG and for AVI, I don't want a seperate, Apple-made-and feature-poor player for quicktime movies.
I haven't seen LiViD's player yet, so I can't comment on that. But if I can use one program for QtickTime, AVI, and MPEG, I'll use it. By the way, what makes everything Apple makes inherently bad, as you seem to imply? For that matter, what features is the QuickTime player missing?
we linux users can't play the videos that windows/mac users view with the latest quicktime product. i'm sure apple knows this already, and i guess it's ok to remind them, but i think there's a better idea.
how about the next time you run across a web site that is using a media architecture that _you_ can't view (because you are using something other than windows or macos) *tell the webmaster*!
next time you head over to broadcast.com, and you can't play the "windows media" streams, let them know. email starwars.com and tell them you can't view the trailer that's in quicktime. and so on...
perhaps if the _content providers_ realize that there is a large market that is entirely overlooked, they will pressure the people who provide them technology into doing something smart -- making it accessible to everyone. of course, apple will listen to people (ie, lucasarts) that license ($$) their technology. if not, too bad for them. maybe the content providers will switch to a more widely accepted format.
either way, we win.
- pal
If Apple open-sourced QT, then MS would be able to make its Windows Media player play QT movies. QT is Apple's ace in the hole, it's more popular than MacOS (even with the stupidly designed qt4 player). They're not going to give that away.
I don't see anything wrong with a *nix QT client though. I remember reading that Apple usually has to hold back the release date for each version of QT because the Windows version takes so long. Other platforms would probably only add to that delay, and with streaming taking off the way it is, any kind of delay can be lethal. Just look at the delay between QT4 and 4.1. 4.1 isn't a huge upgrade (afaik, it adds support for vbr mp3s and ads in video streams) but it took a long time; I'm sure much of that delay was syncing the Mac and Windows versions.
handy quicktime link
PS - I love the name "Windows Media Player for Mac." They couldn't just call it the MS Media Player?
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rooooar
QuickTime is not a codec. QuickTime is not even a movie player. QuickTime is an entire media architecture, and there isn't really anything else like it out there. It supports every type of media you can imagine (images, movies, audio, MIDI, 3D, panoramas, vector-based animations). It supports dozens of of formats. It has its own built-in little language, so you can make interactive stuff in it (it has built-in Flash support too). It has its own complex file format that allows you to combine any supported formats in one file (so, for example, you could have a Sorenson encoded movie with a music track in MIDI, the lyrics for that track in MP3, and in-movie controls in Flash). It probably contains more code than the Linux kernel.
And it was never written with portability in mind. QuickTime was only ported to Windows by implementing a nice chunk of the Mac OS API on it. Porting QuickTime to Linux would be a very, very big undertaking.
However, QuickTime will run on Mac OS X, which is less similar (from a technical perspective) to current Mac OS versions that Linux is. It's possible that porting QT from Mac OS X to Linux wouldn't be such a problem.
Alternatively, it might be possible to write something that just played QT- encapsulated Sorenson video streams with QDesign audio tracks (which is what virtually all streaming QT content is compressed with) and didn't do everything else QT does. The QuickTime file format and streaming protocol are both open, so this would be possible with no help from Apple if someone wants to license the relevant codecs from Sorenson and QDesign.
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Try this link.
Myself and Jon Reeves Hall of the Linux Users Group at Georgia Tech are organizing this petetion, and so far response has been great. Let Apple know that the Linux community will support them by BUYING the commercial version of the player if it's available, as that is their main benefit in doing the port (and so few Windows users buy it, perhaps we'll become a tier-one development platform =)
--Josh Litherland, LUG@GT
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
A Quicktime client for Linux
A Open Source version without proprietary codecs.
The first of these would be within Apple's abilities, but the second isn't really. They can't give away proprietary codecs they don't themselves own, and the only alternative then is to not use those codecs which ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
And the actual petition just mentions a port, not an open source version.
Might be better than nothing, but on the other hand proprietary standards isn't something very desirable in and of itself.
-- Eythain