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Quicktime 5 vs. Everybody?
Dean Siren asks: "Now that Apple has released the Quicktime 5 Public Preview, they've upgraded their video codec to Sorenson 3 from Sorenson 2 which Jeremy Neish says pales in comparison to MPEG4 and its derivatives. So, how well does Sorenson 3 compete against MPEG4 as far as quality per bitrate, processor demand, compression times, and streaming are concerned? Can Apple now stay ahead of DivX, Windows Media Player 7 and Real Player 8?" Neish notes that none of the latest codecs are not compatible with Unix so only Mac and Windows users get to take advantage of the latest in digital video formats. When someone gets around to fixing this, then I can again get excited about Quicktime, until then it's just another format to me (and yet another reason why I have to have a Windows box lying around).
(actually, I obviously love to keep harping on this, or I wouldn't.)
Apple is not now, nor have they ever been, a friend of the open source movement. Were they a friend, they would at least release a binary only, closed source version of Quicktime for Linux. Better still, a binary-only plug-in for Xanim. Best, they would release the Sorenson decoder source (the real magic of these things is not in the decoder, but in the ENCODER: figuring out what data to eliminate is the hard work, reconstructing it is relatively easy.)
What has Apple done for the open source or free software movements? They've released yet another kernel for PPC. Nice, but we already have several OSS and free software kernels out there.
The next time Apple tries to milk the movements for free publicity, stand up and call them on it.
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