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Apple Sues Sorenson Over QuickTime Codec
ScooterComputer writes "According to Bloomberg and a bunch of others, Apple is suing Sorenson over their licensing a codec to Macromedia for Flash MX, for 'developing, marketing, or licensing any version of the compression software used in QuickTime to competitors.' For years we have seen finger pointing going on between Apple and Sorenson as to WHY the Sorenson codec can't make it to the Linux platform... and things usually end with Apple saying it is Sorenson's fault. Well, I'd say Apple lied. So, can we all just start putting big pressure on Apple again to release QuickTime for Linux?"
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Obviously, some expert is going to have to sit down for the court and determine if the product for QuickTime and the product for Macromedia really are different. But if they're not, Apple has a totally valid lawsuit. A (legal and reasonable) contract is a contract. Apple agreed to pay $4.5 Million based on getting exclusive use of the (very, very good) software. If someone else can use it, that seriously dilutes its value to Apple, and there's no reason for them to have paid so much for it.
Also, it doesn't answer the question as to why 99.99% of all other desktop software makers (Macromedia being a slightly on-topic example) don't release for Linux, since they have no OS monopoly to protect.
The sad fact is there's no money to be made in the Linux desktop market. Linux user's don't buy desktop apps, they don't buy games... They might buy highend workstation software like 3D modellers, but this has less to do with the "Linux community" than it does with animation houses trying to cut costs by going with a free (as in beer, they could care less about the other supposed benefits) operating system.
For most software, any money a developer spends creating and supporting a Linux version of their software is money that is pissed away, never to be recouped. That's no way to run a business.
That's like saying 100% of the Mercedes market is a monopoly, because nobody else makes Mercedes automobiles except Mercedes.
mark
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -- Carl Sagan
Hm. Last I checked, Quicktime and Flash occupied rather different niches in the "things move on your screen" realm of the world. Quicktime is a movie and, to a lesser extent, audio format. Flash is a vector-graphics animation and interaction product that just happens to have support for raster graphics, sounds, and now movies. Even with movie support in Flash, I wouldn't use it to /play/ movies....
This flies in the face of science.
Apple to my knowledge has never bad-mouthed X Windows; in fact the Unix ad you mention shows XDarwin running. And Apple has opened up far more of their source than they are required to. Yes, they're only releasing some of the code they've spent millions of dollars writing, rather than all of it. That hardly makes them the enemy.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
I have a partial solution to this. If a distro like Red Hat pays Apple a huge sum of money, then Apple could release an open-source player, with closed codecs.
I doubt Apple would want to do this, they want to make every app with high standards. Even quicktime for windows is nicely written, they wouldn't port it over to Linux if it would be unsupported and buggy and unstable. Only a year or two ago they took to a public beta, but everything else shoots for quality.
Hear, hear.
This has nothing to do with Apple porting QuickTime to Linux. Apple was reliant on Sorensen for that. Apple's contract with Sorensen wouldn't preclude Sorensen from letting their CODEC be used on Linux as long as it was QuickTime for Linux that using it. Apple gains nothing by refusing to release QuickTime for Linux. Linux users seem to think that Apple is out to spite them for some unknown reason.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Why downloading a overbloated system that kills CPU usage and hogs down the system (on PC that is) like media player 7 and above does, if you could have it in a tightly optimized and efficient distributed way? I say: go macromedia.
Flash is everywhere, like it or not, and they do a good job at porting the plugin to a lot of platforms (even if it's not EVERYWHERE yet) Like it or not, if you surf the web a lot, you hit flash content, the plugin is small, you don't need a 5MB download and install and useless clugging down just to view one file once in a while.
Most of the people on windows are downloading quicktime to almost exclusively view movies encoded with that sorenson coded, mainly because most of all of the other codecs supplied by apple sucks (exept the dv).
I mean, most of them are about the quality of microsoft AVI RLE encoding (aside from the mjpeg and mpeg and dv and anythign high bandwidth that isn't impressive over the net). I do a lot of video editing, I did codec research and analysis a few years ago, made codec-buster files and evaluated most of them with their strong and weak points, if apple would want quicktime to take off and become useful on something other than a Mac, they would have to bring in big guns. Sorenson is nice but it's not even close to DIVX in quality and performance (try playing a quicktime movie at 1280x960 for example, and feel the jerking and all). Why download a 20megs movie preview if you can fit it in 5 megs with about the same quality? that's an extra 4:1 compression (I'm talking roughly here and not considering the time of encoding and all).
Usually if I want to distribute a movie on PC with the maximum quality at lowest bitrate possible, I think DIVX. If I want to distribute cross-platform, with no hassles, MPEG comes to mind. there are VERY good mpeg encoders and if you know what you are doing and how mpeg works, you can output VERY nice results taking minimal bandwidth and competing directly with realvideo (well for anything above 80x80 like most people like encoding in RV). The BIG problem with mpeg movies, is the people encoding them. They hack a cable signal to their tv tuner and encode without knowing what an I-frame is and where they could cut off or optimize the bandwidth usage. The result? most mpeg movies on the net sucks and gives a bad name to mpeg.
I think most people that have basic video codec knowledge here aren't impressed by sorenson, especially when leeching a 20+ meg movie trailer for the resolution it gives, at these file size we're used to double of that resolution with about the same quality when using PC codecs like mpeg-4 based.
Yeah quicktime 6 will have mpeg-4 I know, good for them, but too late, DIVX got the crown there, plus it's EFFICIENT, I can watch HDTV video on my athlon with that beast.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I really doubt it's an active conspiracy on Apple's part - the software business is at best a shaky balancing act: R&D vs. ROI.
The return on porting or allowing Quicktime to be ported to Linux would be nil - there aren't enough Linux users who would be willing to BUY the QT player to make it pan out on the R&D end.
Second, the goodwill generated would be short-term at best, since the most vocal Linux users don't want anything to do with commercial software. It's hard to justify providing a product to someone for free when the loudest barking dogs are barking at you.
Then again, it could be a conspiracy - but Apple is under no obligation to provide ANY tools to Linux users, since that could hurt their own bottom line with OSX.
When it comes down to it, Linux on the desktop has yet to prove that it can generate a long-term sustainable business model, except in a few limited instances. Things are going well on the server side, but the desktop is headed in so many directions, it's impossible to tell who's on top and therefore deserves the largest chunk of development money.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Actually, both MPEG-1 and Sorenson Video 3 use Y'CrCb (aka YUV) 4:2:0 color, where there is one color sample for each 2x2 block of pixels.
The older Sorenson Video 1 & 2 used YUV-9, which has one color sample for each 4x4 block of pixels. This isn't nearly enough, and caused quality problems.
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