QuickTime To Move To MPEG-4

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.

Comments

Re:Platform neutral... eh ?

[znu]

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.