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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.

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Quicktime for Linux? by ebooher · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Ok, label me as naive here, but how does the inclusion of MPEG-4 video have anything to do with Quicktime being available for Linux? (Which it already is by the way, in a manner of speaking.)

    It isn't like the Sorenson codec couldn't run under Linux. It runs just find under BSD/Darwin with Quartz (read as OS X). Apple just has absolutely no interest in making a streaming video client for Linux.

    The standard and original Quicktime libraries have been available on Linux for a while, check out http://www.heroinewarrior.com/quicktime.php3 but all of the "cool movie trailers" available on Apple's website are in Sorenson, and it's Sorenson that isn't available under Linux. Chances are, if they *do* embrace MPEG-4 it will probably be an Apple / Quicktime specific version so that we still won't see it under Linux.

    However, I've read that their streaming video server runs just fine.

    Just my 2 cents worth of nothing

    --
    "Genius may shine aloof and alone, like a star, but goodness is social, and it takes two men and God to make a Brother."
  2. It's not that we need it by VFVTHUNTER · · Score: 4, Interesting

    it's that we need to NOT need it. What I mean is that the only movies I can't play right now are the ones with Sorensen and other proprietary codecs. Were Apple and folks to stop using these, I would be able to play pretty much anything.

    I use MPlayer. It supports every codec (save Sorensen et al) that I've run across. It has a gui now, or it runs from the command line (for all the people who want to script their multiple-file porn). Furthermore, it's actually better than WMP for several reasons, my favorite being that WMP requires you to have an entire AVI file on disk before it will play it, whereas with MPlayer you can start watching while you are still downloading it.

    If this doesn't seem important to you, consider downloading a 200MB file only to discover its crappy quality. With MPlayer, you can check it as soon as you've downloaded enough bytes to play a few frames, thus saving tons of bandwidth, not to mention disk space or time spent unraring things.

    I use MPlayer only, but I have seen other OSS players and they are just as good. Lastly I will mention that the day I got MPlayer up and running was the same day that I killed my last Win* partition. I haven't rebooted since :)