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10th Anniversary of Quicktime

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the something-to-think-about dept.

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.

5 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Quicktime and Real Audio are already dead. by skrowl · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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/
  2. You would think with OS X by DebianDog · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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.

  3. QuickTime clients are horrible by Trepidity · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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
  4. Revisionist History by dfinney · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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.

  5. typical rewriting of history by vscjoe · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    No, Apple did not invent desktop multimedia. The MPEG working group was established in 1988, and other codecs for digital audio and video were around long before that.

    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.