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10th Anniversary of Quicktime
An anonymous reader submitted a story about the 10th anniversary of QuickTime which might not seem like such a big deal unless you set your mental wayback machine to 1991 and remember what we didn't have back then. Bits from Brian Eno and others. Worth reading.
Not everybody decides to eschew superior technology because their pet platform is incapable of supporting it.
DivX ;), Windows Media and other MPEG4 based solutions have already killed them. They take less bandwidth and scale from palm-based to near-DVD quality.
Yay to it's 10th anniversary, I guess... but I doubt it will see it's 15th.
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
"Not everybody decides to eschew superior technology because their pet platform is incapable of supporting it."
any actual proof that it is superior? thought not.
hahahaha quicktime! i know we all hate wintel, but come on, let's have some good apple bashing on this one. while the rest of the world has embraced mpg, apple stil clings to it's sorry quicktime format. what's next? the 15th anniversary of adb?
OS X is Unix! (Well BSD based)
You would think Apple would easily be able to port over Quicktime to Linux and want to give it away in order to keep M$ from dominating yet another market.
I guess I am just not smart enough to figure out why you would not want to market to non-M$ers. I say give the player away! Make it up on QTpro for Linux like they do with the Win products.
While QuickTime was certainly ahead of its time, and the format itself is not bad, the clients are simply horrible. Perhaps they were okay for the early 90s, but they never progressed; hell the current version of the Windows client still hasn't even implemented a full-screen mode...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Yet another Mac history revision lesson, where the "only way" to do it was with a Mac and now it is "even better" using a Mac.
It seems to me that Sarnoff Labs (RCA) devloped a digital video system that would play back from CD-ROM around 1983, then sold it to Intel in the late 80s which was productized as DVI by around 1990. Subsequently, Microsoft and Apple trumpeted their respective file formats (Quicktime and AVI) but in reality both formats used essentially the same codecs.
If anyone remembers the San Francisco Canyon/Apple/Microsoft/Intel debacle, you'll know just how similar these technologies really are. The Sarnoff Labs technology is likely the progenitor, much the same way that Mosaic is the progenitor of all of the major web browsers.
As has been pointed out, QuickTime is pretty much just a different shell on codecs made by someone else.
Where Apple really innovated is in how helpful their website is. I had thought that I just wanted the free version - they let me know I was wrong to think that way.
Real deserves some credit here too, but they give up too quickly. Only Apple takes the high road, giving me a chance to upgrade every time I log in. It's like Real just doesn't care about me once I've made the wrong choice.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
I would view Quicktime as more of what big software companies keep doing: using their market position to push through a proprietary document standard. Video ought to be encoded in open, non-proprietary formats, but thanks to Apple, Microsoft, and RealNetworks, almost all our on-line video content requires you to use proprietary software, and almost all our on-line video content will become inaccessible in a few years.
We shouldn't be grateful to Apple for this; to the contrary: we should hold Apple responsible and make sure this doesn't happen again in the future.
yeh once I install quicktime, I just set windows Media player to play the content using the quicktime codecs... Then I almost never have to look at the shitty quicktime interface..
I myself am wary to celbrate the anniversary of software that is wholly incompatible with anything causing numerous crashes while still delivering low-end bulky quality. why can't we all just be happy with MPEG-4?
PS - while reading this post, a trailer off quicktime.com just crashed my browser. point proven
So, people don't write non-Sorenson codecs for QuickTime under Linux because they wouldn't be as good as Sorenson. Of course, they do write non-Sorenson codecs all the time, just not for QuickTime under Linux.
So QuickTime is bad because it can use the Sorenson codec which is better than the codecs you can use with or without QuickTime. Writing a codec without QuickTime is good, but writing a coded with QuickTime is bad, because QuickTime is bad. So if you write a codec, make sure to write it without QuickTime, because otherwise you'd be bad. Of course, you don't get any advantages from QuickTime, but that's a small price to pay for purity. Also, because you don't use QuickTime, then that means it doesn't exist for Linux.
Of course, the "you" in the preceding paragraph does not mean you personally. I'm also not questioning your description of the logic; it's just a kind of logic I don't see often outside the White House and old Beavis and Butthead reruns.