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QuickTime To Move To MPEG-4

Posted by timothy on from the quicktime-is-polymorphously-perverse dept.

spav writes: "Looks like Apple will be embracing MPEG-4 for its new versions of QuickTime according to C|Net News.com. That could mean quicktime for Linux, but would we need it?" This sounds like a start toward OS-neutral video, but until companies decide not to add proprietary layers making otherwise widely-available formats unavailable, it won't be the end. The first half of this article dwells on QuickTime's 10th birthday, but then gives slightly more detail on the MPEG4 transition.

4 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Platform neutral... eh ? by MosesJones · · Score: 4, Insightful

    MPEG 4 allows you to put lots of things inside the stream, all of them can be platform specific, or hardware specific or whatever. MPEG2 was a rendering of video standard. MPEG4 is a bundling of multimedia content standard. HTML, MPEG2, whatever can be bundled.

    So maybe they'll just bundle QuickTime movies inside the MPEG4 stream but allow a "Flash" style overlay in another content stream.

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    An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
    1. Re:Platform neutral... eh ? by znu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Where do you think the MPEG-4 file format came from? It's QuickTime's file format, or something very close; Apple submitted it to MPEG. So this won't really be a very large change for QuickTime.

      This isn't going to do a damn thing for Linux; the QuickTime file format was already completely documented. The problem is codecs, and as you point out, MPEG-4 does nothing to prevent encapsulation of stuff encoded with proprietary codecs.

      Now, if everyone starts using the video codec frequently called MPEG-4 (not to be confused with the file format specification called MPEG-4) along with MP3 sound tracks, maybe we'll finally get fully standards-based video. But Sorenson 3 is a damn tough codec to beat on quality.

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      This space unintentionally left unblank.
  2. Clever people by YearOfTheDragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "In order for (MPEG-4) to succeed as a standard, it has to be used," said Susan Kevorkian, an analyst with IDC.
    Excel files are a standard for most business.
    But this don't makes Excel files a standard but only a common used format.
    While industry didn't understand this difference, standards aren't going to success.

    --
    -= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
  3. You're forgetting something... by Millennium · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This sounds like a start toward OS-neutral video, but until companies decide not to add proprietary layers making otherwise widely-available formats unavailable, it won't be the end.
    Um, the QuickTime file format is the standard file format for MPEG-4 (at least, according to the MPEG group's standard). You can find free documentation for it at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/2160/ fformats/fformats.htm; look in the "Animation" section.

    The QuickTime codecs are proprietary, true, as is Apple's own implementation. But the QuickTime file format isn't.