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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.
Basically, quicktime allowed the birth of multimedia. The attitudes from the first posters were along the line of "say thank you, and don't forget to kick it as you walk on by"
Of course, if you really like MS Brand Duct Tape, then keep on kicking.
It is sort of like bitching at your grandfather:"I wish you were never born". Which is not exactly bright, on several levels.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I had a QuickTime movie of my rabbits, on my personal homepage in 1995 which, if you had the QT plugin installed, would start playing as soon as it calculated it could reliably play the whole movie without having to pause. The little control bar filled up with gray and then it started playing automatically... very cool.
Considering that the prototype of pro-quality streaming was QuickTime Conferencing in 1994, allowing n people each to stream video to n-1 friends, I think you've got your chronology turned around a bit.
And I don't know what you mean by "portal functionality" but if you mean what I think, that's pretty trivial :)
Well, that's kind of the point; it wasn't just a codec. At a time when everyone else was doing FLC animation (shudder) or straight-shot MPEGs, Apple envisioned a media format which was extensible and flexible. Its design played well with time. Basically the multimedia revolution has been another case of Apple being the skunkworks R&D department for the entire industry.
No, no, no ... you guys are talking about this like it's a QuickTime vs Real vs MS Media Player war, like the only issue is the media player clients, or streaming video. The video has to exist on the computer in the first place before you can convert it to Real or MS formats and stream it. What you're taking for granted is that this stuff even exists on computers at all. That's what the 10 year anniversary of QuickTime is about. It's the UNIX of multimedia. Saying that QuickTime is no good because more people watch streaming video in Real or MS than in QuickTime Player is like saying whether ASCII or XML is good or not depends on which text editor you use. The reason there are multiple text editors in the first place is because we have these text formats that are easily interoperable, so much so that we take them for granted. That's what QuickTime did for video and multimedia.
... the authors are using QuickTime, the editors are using QuickTime. In other words, there's a workflow that starts in a camera and ends in your RealPlayer or MS Media Player and QuickTime was in the middle somewhere. In a sense, RealPlayer and MS Media Player are QuickTime players, but you convert the QuickTime to Real or MS formats. The fact that all this stuff has a long, long history and is well-integrated into the entire Mac platform is why Apple's iMovie and iDVD are years ahead of everyone else in consumer DV editing and DVD creation (really, the only true consumer entries, not even requiring any hardware or software installation beyond plugging in an iMac). Working with these different rich media types is just much older news on the Mac. The maturity benefits the user like the maturity of Apache over IIS benefits the server user. Apache and QuickTime are so much better than IIS and Windows Media that serving Web pages or working with rich media is taken for granted and many people don't actually ask themselves whether Microsoft's tools just aren't cutting it in the real world, to the level that other tools are.
The video you're watching in RealPlayer was at one point a QuickTime file
QuickTime is also much more than just streaming video or Sorenson streams. It handles all kinds of media, and a QuickTime movie is actually a wrapper for multiple media tracks. So you can easily add a MIDI soundtrack (just by cutting and pasting) to a video presentation, playing the lightweight music file through the built-in software synth that supports DownLoadable Sounds (DLS). Then you can layer on a Flash movie for an interface, and a spoken narrative in MP3. You can add transitions that are built-into QuickTime itself. All of these tracks exist within the single wrapper file.
Really, you can't overstate how important QuickTime has been and is now to any kind of computer multimedia.
Microsoft's earlier Video for Windows effort was even found in court to contain stolen QuickTime code. The didn't just copy the architecture, they also used Apple code. It's not surprising, but it's just symbolic of how much more of a leader Apple has been on this front.