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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.
So now we will have ten years with MPEG-4 after ten years with Apply stuff :-)
:-)
Ten years with MacOS (or more) and now ten years with BSD
"That could mean quicktime for Linux, but would we need it?"...
Uhh, I dunno, I mean, all those pr0^W game trailers would be available for watching..
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.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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."
MPEG-4 standard, as defined by the ISO, is already based on Quicktime format. Don't be fooled just because Microsoft and DivX has created their own proprietary formats before the standards has been put down.
t de vdocs/QTFF/qtff.html
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/quicktime/q
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
If MPEG4 is the CODEC then the data will be displayable assuming there are MPEG4 decoders, which I think there are.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
MPEG-4 is actually based on work done in QuickTime back in 1998. Here is a link to a story from 1998: http://www.internetwk.com/news/news0211-15.htm (and another from Wired) :0 25 5.html
m l
http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/1
Here is the Apple press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1998/feb/11iso.ht
I'm sure there is some ranting to be done about Apple here, but let's not get to reactionary about this.
This is good news for Apple, but there is a snippet of this article that raises an interesting issue:
Analysts predict that rather than pursue an "embrace and extend" strategy, Microsoft and RealNetworks will stick to their guns and continue marketing their own formats. Although those products will not have MPEG-4's interoperability, the companies say advantages include smaller file size, better image and sound quality, and more advanced digital rights management software. Both RealNetworks and Microsoft have invested heavily in creating anti-copying technology that would make it safe for record labels and other content owners to sell their products online.
Steve Jobs' stance has always been that stealing music is a problem of the "community" and not "technology". I wonder if Apple will stand behind this philosophy with MPEG4 or join Microsoft and Real Networks in their security schemes. Just a thought.
"Electric Relaxation" - ATCQ
- Bwana
You *do* know there are various different kinds of things that are labeled "MPEG 4", right? Up until recently, we couldn't play "DiVX ;-)" files, for example, on Linux, and that was a hacked-up version of Microsoft's MPEG-4 implementation (which we also couldn't play). The only reason they play on Linux at all is because someone swiped the libraries from a Microsoft player and figured out how to hook into them. Do you really think, once Apple figures out how to make their own, proprietary version of MPEG 4, that Linux will stand a chance in Hades of playing any more movie trailers than it can today?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"That could mean quicktime for Linux, but would we need it?"
Three words: Star Wars Trailers!
I have been running three Linux servers (good 'ol LAMP) and a Win2K desktop for the past year or so, and decided that the only way I could learn more about my servers is if I immersed myself in Linux all the time. After installing RedHat 7.2 on my desktop, everything for the most part worked great, EXCEPT for the video.
Frames were constantly being lost or being frozen. I had incredible difficulty resolving dependencies when COMPILING FROM SOURCE (this isn't an example of rpm problems). And about half of the MPEG's I have simply don't play. I don't know whether this is due to "proprietary" MPEG formats that Windows Media Player supports, or if it's just a matter of me not having the right codecs, but it's frusturating as all hell, and I feel it's one of the biggest issues preventing Linux from becoming a viable desktop OS, even for the not-entirely-newbie of us.
NSParadox
Unless mankind redesigns itself
"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 =-
QuickTime was choosen as a basis for MPEG-4.
.. .
I think multimedia under Linux has a long way to come and will be one of the clenchers of Joe Average's continuing adoption.
In other words; make it easy to view the pr0n, and they will come runnin'.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
"'I guess they just meant MPEG-4. And to think, I already had it."
So where did you get it? AFAIK, MPEG-4 hasn't been finalized yet. You did read the article, right? The article says, "Once the licensing questions are resolved, companies will still need to put products on the market."
People like MS are bandying about products called MPEG-4 and MP4, but they are not true MPEG-4 products.
Doesn't matter, the Quicktime format is generally made publicly known, and MPEG-4, of course, will be as well. We already have Quicktime for Linux. It's just that they only have the more open codecs which are not popular. For older Quicktime closed codecs there is Xanim. I would wager that the Quicktime for Linux project will be able to add MPEG-4 support and then get a *lot* more useful. Until then there is always Wine (which does work if you coax it enough). If you can't figure out how to make Wine do it, there is always CodeWeavers Crossover plugin. Of course the Wine solutions are x86 only, but with the use of MPEG-4 on the horizon, maybe we will have a more cross-platform style. Of course, it seems silly that all these formats are converging on the same codecs. Nice for developers, but then why bother with .mov files when .avi files will have identical codecs for the most part?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
As pointed out ad nauseum by people on the last story, QUICKTIME IS A CONTAINER FORMAT. It WRAPS different streams of audio and video.
The supported audio formats include WAV, AIFF, AU, mp3 and half a dozen others.
The video standards used have included CinePack, 3 different versions of Sorenson and even Intel's Indeo video (used for years in Microsoft AVIs).
The container format is supported on Linux Open Quicktime
The problem is Sorenson is exclusively licensed to Apple and they do not release it for Unix/Linux.
The other layer of ignorance is that MPEG-4 is also a container method for compressed audio and video streams. In fact its very similar to Quicktime (the packaging standard) indeed because it is actually _based on_ Quicktime!
That's not going to help Linux if they keep using Sorenson. It might help Mac users watch 3ivx, Divx and whatever other encoding formats are sometimes refered to as MPEG-4. You're not going to find this out from the CNET article though. Actually, since Quicktime is a container format, it supports pluggable codecs, so I watch MPEG4/{X}ivx video in Quicktime already - but it sure would be nice if Apple shipped those codecs out of the box.
The article is BS on many other points in any case - I would estimate over 50% of the streaming video I see out there is available in Quicktime format (though often alongside one of the other two). I mean, its very much the right tool for the right job at present... have you ever seen a good looking movie trailer in Real Video? I've seen a couple of OK ones, but the filesizes were similar to better looking Quicktime packaged (ie, Sorenson encoded) trailers. On the other hand I might use Real where image quality is less important. Oh, and of course, Quicktime includes mp3 support - its not competing with it!
So what does all this mean? Obviously Apple adopting MPEG4 could mean one of two things:
If Apple stick with pushing Sorenson as the primary codex (and hey, it is *really* nice looking) and don't ship any of the typical MPEG4 codecs, well that's not much news. If they ship {X}ivx alongside Sorenson, that's great because it allows content producers to choose, and Linux users can ask them to choose the more widely available {X}ivx compressors.
If I was more naive I'd say I can't believe CNET were presenting the "move" to MPEG4 as a retreat for Quicktime. MPEG 4 is the standardization of Quicktime and a vindication of its owenership of the professional market! Are they stupid or deliberately spinning it - you decide!
So all in all the CNET article is biased, tells you very little about what's actually been announced (is it new codecs? is it more standards compliance?) and tries to spin a victory as a defeat. Oh yeah, and Timothy's comments show he has no clue in this area either...
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
I was at BSDCon Europe last month where Jordan Hubbard (now working at Apple) gave a presentation on all that was brilliant about Mac OS X for the BSD Unix crowd. At the end, in the Q&As, somebody did ask about the porting of Quicktime to other OS.
From the answer, which was pretty neutral and he didn't seem to want to rock the boat - Jordan rated the chances of it being ported as smaller than slim. Because of all the low-lovel codec code that needs to be ported and optimised for the OS, porting QT is apparently an Evil Job, and they wouldn't have ported to Windows if it wasn't for the fact Windows had such a huge market share.
In short, don't hold your breath. If it does start making it's way out as a port, expect it for the BSD Unixes first, as they are likely to be the easiest to port to from OS X/Darwin (i.e. nothing more than a recompile on another machine)
We'd have had it eventually anyway.
Sooner or later Apple will tire of shipping and supporting two OSes, and they'll have to write code for OSX supporting all their technologies.
Once they do, it won't be hard to wrap an emulation layer or two around it for Linux.
Well, OK, it'll be hard, but not beyond the capabilities of a small Open Source project.
QuickTime asks you to upgrade on the first application start of each day it's used.
... change your date back at this point.
BEFORE starting QuickTime change your date to a MUCH higher year e.g. 2020.
Then start QuickTime.
When asked to "Why upgrade?" click "Later." NOTE: giggle to your self at this point.
QuickTime won't ask you to upgrade again til the first time you use it in 2020.
Oh yeah
Dirt doesn't need luck.
The first push to use those extra layers will be for licensing.
I doubt it will be for things that actually *improve* the end viewer's experience, but more for things that *limit* your allowed experience.
Why do I have this feeling? Before I moved from the US, I used to love wathing foreign films; I would watch Asian or European films with English Subtitles. (On VHS from any video store.) I naively figured that with DVD technology, I would be able to rent a French movie in Tokyo and be able to turn on English subtitles. I mean, your typical DVD movie is ~4GB- that leaves what, like 3GB for 'extras'? I guessed that multi-lingual subs would be a no-brainer.
Guess what? I over-estimated the no-brainer part...
With this bad taste already in my mouth, I have little hope that Quicktime will use these extra 'layers' in any way that I will find useful.
-- My Weblog.
I just crashed my PC in their honor. Thanks for all the fun, QT!
------
Let me give you the lowdown
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./ fformats/fformats.htm; look in the "Animation" section.
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
The QuickTime codecs are proprietary, true, as is Apple's own implementation. But the QuickTime file format isn't.
While using the win32 libs is still a very popular widespread method, ffmpeg and opendivx native linux cores are often used to play back divx content. My DivX with MP3 audio avi files play without any win32 stuff needed (so non-x86 DivX playback is possible). I keep win32 stuff around for Indeo avis (Xanim has a native module, but doesn't support mp3 audio tracks) and other random stuff, but for the DivX I don't need dlls...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
> but would we need it?
Arg, for *years* I hear slashdotters whine about QuickTIme. (I can't see the Starwars trailer without quicktime, I can't believe it. I hate apple) And now all the sudden linux is to good for Quicktime?
Quicktime Pro "activates" is what you get when you put a SN into Quicktime. Inserting the SN grants you increased functionality - Full Screen Playback, Splicing Movies, Converting Movie Formats as well as numerious other things that i dont know about (visit www.apple.com/quicktime/ for further info. as for MPEG-4 multiplatform i suggest you examin 3ivx - from what i udnerstand the 3ivx group is part of mpeg and their codex is avaliable on windows (all), macOS(pre and post 10), Unix/Linux (for both xAnim and OpenQuicktime), BEOS and amegia (for MooVid & SoftCinima) for more information check www.3ivx.com.
So you see, MPEG-4 is not new, nor is "multiplatform" mpeg-4... but its great to see it getting the recognition it deserves
I thought I read a long while back that QuickTime 3 or 4 was going going to be used as the basis for MPEG-4. Does anyone else remember that? If so, can you explain it better?
I haven't seen any interest in Quicktime on UNIX. Unix hackers may not have liked Microsoft in the past but they're not stupid. Microsoft is going to be around for a long time and no-one wants to use a format that isn't going to be around for a long time.
Ok, lets set this straight. The *file format* for MPEG-4 is based on that of quicktime. Defining the file format is like a millionth of the total work done on MPEG-4. ISO didn't define the file format for jpeg for example, which led to some problems, so this time they decided to define everything. Oh, and speaking of microsoft and divx, this is how I recall things happened (an mpeg guy told me): Microsoft offered the group to implement all ideas for the format, so that they could see the effect of various decisions. This naturally was a good thing (TM), however, when others wanted to see the actual code, ms denied that. So a european initiative started under some German company IIRC, to develop an open source implementation. Maybe it was called divx already here, maybe not. They caught up pretty much with MS, but then there was some problem with that code, it belonged to the company even though it was open source, so the project forked, one was rewriting it from the ground, and another continued on the work already done. So I believe that the rumour that divx is based on a hacked ms codec is bull. Also, MS added some extra bits to the file format, and doesn't call it MPEG-4 anymore, but rather MPGE-4 based or something to that effect. Sorry I'm so vague with the details.
This worked for me with Mac OS 9.2.1. It will probably work with other platforms as well.
Set your computer's date a couple years ahead, and open Quicktime, preferably for the first time that day. Reset your date, of course, and voila!
I have not seen the nag screen since.
I wouldn't expect to see Quicktime for Linux anytime soon.
However, an interesting fact: according to last month's Linux Format (a really good UK Linux mag, IMO) Apple actually changed their license so that CodeWeavers could legitimatly use the Windows Quicktime 5 plugin for Netscape under Linux.
So again, don't expect to see a native version of Quicktime for Linux anytime soon... but don't expect Apple to completely ignore Linux either. (Insert obligatory plug for Codeweaver's plugin here... here's mine: Quicktime works great even on my laptop! Try it out!)
The way I understood the Apple Quicktime/Linux problem, Apple and Sorenson are busy childishly pointing fingers at each other as the reason they can't do a Linux version. Sorenson says "Apple can do Sorenson on Linux if they write Quicktime player for it" and Apple says "We can't write a Quicktime player for Linux without Sorenson on it first".
Ogg Tarkin, where are you? :-)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
First off, the _format_ of quicktime files has been "known" in the public domain for many many years. One of the first public domain implementation, XANIM, was based on reversed engineered knowledge of the format and Apple doesn't appear to have tried to prevent the dissemination of this information. In fact, by handing this same format to the MPEG-4 committee it is actually MPEG-4 that has become quicktime, not the other way around. That said, there are _MANY_ different video codecs which are supported inside the Quicktime format, some invented by apple (Road Pizza) and others by third parties(Cinepak, Sorenson). The point is that even if Apple _wanted_ to release the source to quicktime, they could not. (For example XANIM's author was required by the owners of Cinepak to release only "object" versions of his reverse engineered implementation. I note they were nice enough not to completely shut him down. ) That said, the base MPEG-4 video/audio codec is most clearly a specification open to all, and you can expect Linux implementations.
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
Something that most people forget is that ALL of the MPEG codecs are possibly non-free in the US due to software patent issues. This is because MPEG as an ISO standards body accepts patented technology when deciding on standards.. (oh yeah, and because the US has evil software patents in the first place) Contrast, for example W3C, the web standards body, which does not accept patented technology, although this was recently debated. So either way, open standard or not, MPEG4 is freely available for use on Linux.
Software patents are a threat to free software and free speech. Just say NO!
If, in a fit of altruism, I transcoded popular movie trailers from Sorenson and put them on the web would I be guilty of something?
Guilty of something, but it probably wouldn't be copyright infringement. United States copyright law, 17 USC 107, provides exceptions for "fair use" of a copyrighted work. As ichimunki pointed out, because you would normally post the trailers for the purpose of promoting the movie (criterion 1), because the trailer is expressly designed for such use (criterion 2), and because the trailers were free anyway (no economic market; criterion 4), a judge with sense would find that transcoding and posting the trailers does not infringe on the studio's bottom line.
However, to cover your @$$, please ask first. Tell the studio that millions of users of BSD and Linux operating systems cannot run QuickTime Player and will have more of a chance of seeing the film if they can see the trailer, and that your mirror of the trailer will help save on their Akamai mirroring bill. If you ask, and the studio declines, then you can post your "Disney Sucks!" or "AOL Pictures Sucks!" page explaining exactly why the trailers are not available.
DMCA Disclaimer: Current interpretations of 17 USC 1201 treat circumvention and infringement as orthogonal offences. Whether a work is eligible for Section 1201 restrictions against circumvention depends only on if a copyright exists (term determined by the Bono Act), not on whether the circumvention is also an act of infringement.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There are "profiles" for MPEG-4 that specify certain combinations of codecs (and exclude anything else). Most MPEG-4 video will comply to one of the profiles that precludes random proprietary stuff from being embedded in the stream, thus you will be able to play them with open source tools like MPEG4IP.
There are official standards (say, 802.11) and de facto standards (of which Excel is a good example).
Excel is not a standard. By definition, a standard includes human-readable documentation of what meets or does not meet the standard. Excel is a proprietary format with a widely available reference implementation, and this implementation likes to segfault (instead of failing gracefully) whenever an Excel document contains anything invalid.
Sometimes the marketplace runs ahead of the standards bureaucracy.
I remember when applications came with complete file format documentation. If they didn't, it was available cheap from the app publisher.
businesses need to inter-operate with their partners, and if it means (say) exchanging Word documents to do it, that's what they'll settle for.
Why can't they exchange HTML documents instead?
Will I retire or break 10K?
QT and WMP are pretty stable and easy to use apps, but RealPlayer is, and always has been, buggy as hell, especially considering it doesn't even get the kind of workout the other two do because it is mostly for streaming video and nothing else (yes you can encode videos in the RealMedia codec, but why on earth would you want to when it produces by far the worst video of the commercial codecs?)
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
Well, somebody should sue them. It hurts that it looks like Windows 95.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Quicktime on Linux is not a problem with the CodeWeavers plug-in Crossover plugin (http://www.codeweavers.com). Some will baulk at the 20 bucks.
You may wish to try a newer build. I know that OpenDivx plays Divx3 content under linux and windows on my sys, encoding, however, is another story
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.