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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.
Here is an history of QuickTime by a group of QuickTime developers, "Friends of Time" :
http://www.friendsoftime.org/
-J
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
It's important to understand that Quicktime is not a compression algorithm. If it were, then I would agree with your statement. However, Quicktime is one level above the compression algorithm--it can work with many different algorithms. There's no reason to believe that there won't be a MPEG-4 codec for Quicktime soon (if it's not available already).
While the most popular codecs involved will change, Quicktime will be around for a long time to come.
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"
DivX is simply a codec. It is not a media layer. Codecs can be added and removed from applications and media layers. Example: I watch DivX movies under Quicktime using a file conatining the codec (although there are a few differing bastardised versions of MPEG4, generally the 3ivx, 4ivx, and 5ivx codecs I have installed here handle most formats.
Furthermore even with windows if you want support for many of these codecs you still have to go out and hunt down the codec. One of the most annoying things with avi files is the you never know what format they are in. The avi format actually can use as many as 15 separate formats (codecs) which are incompatable with each other.
What I have yet to see anywhere else is a single multimedia layer comprising MIDI synth, picture, video, panoramas, etc.
/rant/
It really is not Apple's fault that Linux developers have payed so little attention to developing Linux based solutions for Apple formats. I finbd it amazing how much of the horrible proprietary windows junk finds it's way to my linux/BSD boxen and how poor support is for Apple things. And then the galling thing is that Apple takes the blame for it here. One example was a suggestion that Apple by using their own filesystem for the iPod was horrible and proprietary and they should have used Fat 32. (reality check here) Apple should ditch their own file format and use Microsofts? kidding, right?
Microsft calls GPL evil, and Apple hires OSS developers and gives source code for core of their _current OS_ away and some of you guys still bash Apple for M$... go figure...
/rant/
It is always difficult to be the first and often others capitalize on your success while you are relegated as an also-ran (like so many times with M$ and Apple).
However, that said, QT is a superior product in many ways and it has every possibility of becoming a media platform if of itself. M$ knows this and it scares the hell out of them. This is why they are trying so hard to defeat QT and even tried to kill it a couple of years ago by leveraging Office for Macintosh against Apple.
Don't be suprised to see QT media devices being produced in the next couple of years. All tying into the "Digital Hub" concept.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Hey, I was selling Amigas in 1991... :)
What Quicktime got right (and it saddens me to see people falling over themselves to flame it B3KUZ 1TZ PRUHP1Et4RY) was that they spec'ed a really nice, solid API with architectural room to grow. When Quicktime was released, mainstream personal computers had 16-33 MHz CPU's, maxed out at 8-16 megabytes of RAM, a 32-bit video card cost >$1000, etc.
Quicktime's API was so clean that a video playing application (such as Popcorn or the original Simple Player) written for Quicktime 1.0 in 1991 can still run on top of Quicktime 5.x today, taking advantage of all the codecs written in the interim period. When Apple added PNG support to Quicktime, any program that relied on Quicktime for graphics file import immediately gained the ability to read PNG files, without even a recompile.
Quicktime is not a video player, it is not a streaming plugin, and it is not a replacement for MPEG.
Um, Quicktime has little to do with the compression format. It uses other people's compression algorithms to store the compressed video. The person who sets up the video can choose any number of compression formats.
I know there are some people out there who are annoyed that Linux is unable to read some Quicktime files out there. That's not Apple's fault at all, rather it is the fault of the compression format used. Most of the Quicktime files are compressed using the Sorenson codec, because of the superior quality and great compression it offers. The problem is that Sorenson holds the patent on the codec and they have only produced a decoder for Windows and MacOS. In order for Linux users to play those Quicktime movies which use the Sorenson codec, Sorenson would have to produce a Linux version of the decoder. There are a few programs out there that can play Quicktime movies, but only the movies that use codecs supported by Linux.
The same thing has happened with AVI on the Mac. There are a few Intel codecs that are used by AVI files which have no Mac version of a decoder. Thus, viewing an AVI on a Mac is kind of a crap shoot. I'm sure that this is a planned thing by Intel. Fortunately AVI seems to be dying a slow death as better formats are appearing.
That being said, Quicktime fully supports mpg. In fact, there are only a few odd or proprietary formats that Quicktime can't or doesn't support.
Sapere aude!
QuickTime is an API framework for passing data through converters. These converters are called codecs (from encode, decode.)
Sorensen is probably the highest quality video codec with good compression for QuickTime. But there are a dozen other free codecs, including the widely available H.263 codec.
QuickTime is available on Linux, it's only the Sorenson codec that is not.
Given these simple facts, why does the Linux community continue to bitch about the absense of QuickTime for linux? Where are the open-source codecs to replace Sorenson? Why isn't the community insisting that web authors use a more widely available codec than Sorenson?
Or, to invert the question, why aren't the few open-source codecs that _are_ being developed being developed as QuickTime codecs? Why can't I get OggVorbis as a QuickTime codec? If the open source world built codecs for QuickTime, they would be usable with a minimum of fuss on Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, which would have a huge impact on adoption. Plus, so much of the boilerplate work, like authoring and playback software, would already be done for them!
It's sad, the opportunity being wasted like this.
-pmb
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.
1. That isn't "most features" that is one feature (two if you rally consider "portal functionality" a feature).
2. QuickTime's streaming technology is drastically different from Real's; It uses some of the same codecs as non-streaming video and really helps blur the line between streaming and non-streaming video, making the different versions of the video much easier to manage. QuickTime also uses the RTSP standard.
3.QuickTime's streaming technology delivers at least 4x the clarity of the same video encoded with the Real codec at the same bitrate, so in any event you have to admit that QT streaming video runs circles around Real and WM
4. QuickTime Streaming Server is open source, so you can go look at the "guts" yourself and stop your reflexive Apple-bashing
Oh yes, QuickTime has brought about a revolution in digital media!
True; the sarcastic parts of your post seem to be more accurate.
And nobody has ever duplicated it or surpassed it since!
I think a large part of the article was about how many people have duplicated it. QT still ships with the best codecs, integrates more technologies, and lets content creators do more, so player notwithstanding it is still the best video technology.
It's a media format wrapper (not a codec like MPEG...
That is why it was such a revolutionary technology, although Apple does take a role in the development of some of QT's important codecs, the reason QT allowed multimedia to spread was that it allowed you to deal with codecs transparenttly, even today most people still just think they're dealing with QuickTime video whether it is compressed with the Video or Sorenson codecs, nor will they be aware if the audio is uncompressed, MP3, PureVoice, or QDesign, or even if the author switches codecs midstream (do that with your "equivalent if not better tools").
QuickTime didn't start a revolution. It didn't change the world.
Yeah, that multimedia thing never really caught on.
The author has a very valid point: QuickTime is one of the very few technologies that was responsible for the explosion of a technology and is still the premier technology for it. Don't try to tell me that there are better technologies for multimedia content delivery; real multimedia professionals are not using MPEG or Real, and WM is almost as big a joke as the current Real codec. Today, Cleaner and the Sorenson codec are the Photoshop of high quality web multimedia, sure there are GIMPs of web multimedia, but don't try to say they are better.
I know many /.ers can't use real QuickTime, and I really think Apple should create a Linux version, but lets not have a bunch of sour grapes.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
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.