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

Reality distortion

[shut_up_man]

Jeez... suits...

I really wish these guys would realise that all their products suck. Quicktime, Windows Media Player, Realplayer, I hate them all. They're bloated, slow, annoying, buggy, badly-designed pieces of crap. The only reason I haven't blown them away is the whole exclusive delivery scam these guys are trying to pull. The Star Wars trailer comes out, it's only in Quicktime, and there's no way to convert it to something less obnoxious. If I had a choice, I'd get one of my Mac buddies to convert it into DivX, or MPEG2, or something, and watch it without the pain.

What floors me is that these exclusive releases are then used as "proof" for the popularity of the format. That's like having a beauty contest with only one contestant! If they wanted to be fair (which they don't, of course), they would provide it in a wide range of formats, and see which one is the most popular. But no, it's all about the monopoly.

Of course, let's not even start with Media Player resurrecting itself or Quicktime hijacking my mp3 associations or Realplayer leaking memory and spamming me with ads. It's a nightmare, but at least I can still watch the Lord of the Rings trailers... mmmmmm....

What do YOU propose is better?

[NSParadox]

What, pray you, do you think is a better player -- especially when you are comparing EASE OF INSTALLATION (the most important factor in the popularity of a video player, since people will use the codecs that everyone else uses -- including a grandmother).

I just took a look at several video players I could find on freshmeat, and I wasn't impressed at all. Most listed frequent crashing bugs. MPlayer spends more time describing why gcc 2.96 is bad than telling you how to install or workaround various issues. Oh yeah, and if I want a GUI with MPlayer, I have to not only download a separate skin, but also change a compiler flag.

In the meantime, my grandmother could run Windows Media Player (because it's installed in every version of Windows), play virtually every codec out there (and download the ones she doesn't have, automagically), get excellent performance (sorry, but video on Linux sucks), and wonder why I'm looking at MPlayer's header files trying to debug the goddamn makefile.

If you're talking about other Windows players, I don't see why you wouldn't use WMA, Quicktime, or Realplayer. How are they buggy, or badly-designed? What are you comparing it to?