Slashdot Mirror
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.
I am fed up with this Quicktime !
I am running Unix systems on my machines and I am really fed up to hit the famous: This web page require a quick time plug-in, go to download it !
THERE IS NO QUICKTIME PLUG-IN FOR UNIX
How good can be a format that is not OPEN ????
Developper have to buy the right to code a reader for this format !
This is outrageous ! But, after all, Apple and Microsoft have the same goal... world domination. Microsoft had just done some steps further than Apple. That's all.
Congrats to Apple for the success of their annoyware! Three cheers and all that.
OK.
It has been 10 years since quicktime, most other codecs have been around for a while (MPEG, etc).
There are a lot of misc implementations of quicktime, mpeg, etc. Most are mediocre at best. Certainly none are of the quality I expect from Open Source software.
I mean even DVD support for Linux isn't that great (hi MPAA!).
So what is the problem? Why can't we get a stable Open Source project that handles video, supports multiple codes, and is Open Source?
Do I have to rely on the crossover plugin and the proprietary QuickTime on Linux? I hope not?
Kevin
``The amazing thing about Quicktime is that there was nothing like it before, and everything has been like it since,'' notes PBS commentator Robert X. Cringley. ``Look at the guts of Real Player or Windows Media Player, and you'll see structural copies of QuickTime.''
Aside from the overblown technological utopianism in this article that would make Theodore Roszak (The Cult of Information) physically ill, we have this man's opinion. Robert X. Cringley, self declared cyber evangelist telling us that QuickTime is the end-all, be-all of ALL multimedia formats. Aside from the fact that he's always prone to blow things out of proportion, Cringley has very little technical knowledge, let alone an understanding of software strucutre (or "guts" as he puts it). (Note he completely ignores that most features found in QuickTime today such as streaming capability and portal functionality were derived from RealMedia's software.) Oh yes, QuickTime has brought about a revolution in digital media! It brought democracy to the web! And nobody has ever duplicated it or surpassed it since! Nonsense.
This is all just foolishness and people need to calm down. It's a media format wrapper (not a codec like MPEG as most of these Slashfools are contending). That's all. QuickTime didn't start a revolution. It didn't change the world. And it certainly isn't the greatest thing in multimedia today. Similar technologies were being developed by a number of groups at the same time and we have equivalent if not better tools for producing and converging digital media today.
Why bother.
I mean, c'mon. How come we can run something as tightly tied into windows as Windows Media Player in wine with no problems, but we can't run QuickTime? It's mainly because Apple decided to design QT base don a non-standard toolkit, and make it's user interface a living hell. Not only that, but in windows it takes 3x as long to load as Windows media Player. I don't hate it as much as Real (Hello, bloatware / spyware!), but Apple really messed up awhile back, IMO.
Ten years of QuickTime?
Great, how's about a browser plugin that supports scripting (javascript, anyone?) instead of the brain-dead, and completely useless, features it's had since its release?