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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?"
(Reminder to Apple users to visit Slashdot's Apple section for more Apple-related news.)
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.
Sorensen pointed at Apple and Apple in turn pointed at Sorensen. From the sound of things both parties are at "fault". The line from Sorensen has always been that their contract with Apple wouldn't allow them to do it, yet when Macromedia comes by they suddenly feel that they provide the CODEC to them. The only difference that I can see is that Macromedia could provide some financial incentive to violate their contract whereas Linux, or any party selling Linux operating systems couldn't.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
One thing has become very clear in the Linux world over the last couple of years since the dot com bubble burst. Open Source/Free Software is here to stay, and half-way proprietary solutions won't be accepted by the wider community.
For example, Macromedia have been supplying a Linux Flash client for years, yet it has failed to validify the Flash format as an open standard. It has become a "necessary evil" for sites that feel the need to look 'interactive', but has had minimal market penetration beyond that.
I don't think that releasing a binary-only QuickTime codec would solve any real problems: Firstly, it wouldn't be distributed with some of the most popular distributions like Debian and Mandrake for philosophical reasons as well as technical reasons -- without source code, there's no way to know that the codec will still work in 2 years or that it'll be made available for new architectures, or that bugs will be promptly fixed. NVidia's proprietary graphics drivers for XFree86 have, for example, backfired in many ways. Far from soliciting support from the community, their consistent failure to release specifications for their hardware has irked and frustrated the wider Linux community (not just the Free Software zealots) to the extent that the Tainting monitor had to be added to the kernel just to track bug reports from users of buggy proprietary kernel modules.
I'd say that the future lies with open video codecs like VP3 from On2 Technologies, who've announced that they'll be working with the community to ensure that their next release is LGPL'd and their patents made available in the public domain. This is the kind of codec that should become the de-facto standard on the Web -- not some binary-only QuickTime Sorenson codec that was withheld for years and released begrudgingly. A few years ago, Linux users were quick to praise and embrace vendors of proprietary software who supported Linux, but now, I think the community is big enough to look at the bigger picture and support open standards like VP3 and Ogg that will ensure a more accessible and independent future for Web content in the future.
Being a new Mac user, I have become increasingly aware that most online media content, wheather streaming or downloadable is now in WM or RM format. This is unfortunate for us OS X users because Windows Media Player is crap and Real Player is non existant (unless using OS 9). You would think anything that would make QuickTime technology more widely distributed would be beneficial to Apple. Apparently they don't really care what happens to QT considering QuickTime 6 is way over due.
I feel dirty for doing it, but I use the crossover plugin to view quicktime movies (as well as windows media crap). In my experience, it has worked extremely well, and the installation is a snap!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
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
Actually, Real does.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Sheesh. You'd be hard pressed to find more sensationalistic headlines in the Weekly World News.
Anyway, here's what's likely the case: Apple developed Quicktime. Sorenson developed Codec. Apple asked Sorenson if they could include their codec in the next QT release (which would have been 4.0, I believe). And had them sign a little piece of paper. Likewise, Sorenson had their own little pieces of paper for Apple to sign.
The default Sorenson codec in Quicktime Pro compresses like ass- you get small files, but the color shits out. If you want it to NOT shit out, you have to pay Sorenson a chunk of cash for a media key to plug into its little panel in the QT setup controls. Pain in the ass, but it doesn't prevent you from viewing "properly" encoded "pro" files- like the Star Wars trailers.
Since you don't have to pay to play Sorenson files, and you do have to pay to encode them properly... and 99% of the productivity apps that produce video run on MacOS and Windows (re: NOT Linux)... what incentive does Sorenson have to port the codec? The likelihood of securing any form of revenue stream on a Linux port of Quicktime is pretty shitty, at best.
So Sorenson has their own legal BS with Apple, and Apple likely has a different legal BS going on with Sorenson. Probably something along the lines of "exclusive". Which explains why Apple is pissed at them. I can't blame them at all- Macromedia has been even more sluggish about porting to OS X than Adobe has, and the fact that FlashMX includes the ability to run video may be something of an issue of "percieved competition".
I recently attended a FlashMX presentation from Macromedia and left amazed that Sorenson was bundled within the application itself. Essentially all your website users need is the Flash 6 plug-in to be able to view Sorenson-encoded movies in a Flash file. Only after seeing the lawsuit did I realize how harmful this could be to Apple's QuickTime technology. I hope for Apple's sake that they have a good exclusive contract in place...
My company is looking to use FlashMX's video capabilities *specifically* because then users won't have to download the QuickTime plug-in as well. This attitude could seriously be a detriment to Apple's already-struggling fight against Real and Windows Media Player. Even if the quality is better, this is just another reason to not download their plug-in.
I always enjoy any QuickTime article on Slashdot because it invariably turns into some big debate on why Apple is deliberately keeping Sorenson from licensing the codec to Linux developers, blah, blah, blah.
First off, Apple claims to have an exclusive license to what are commonly known as the Sorenson and Sorenson 3 codecs. Even if Apple decided to waive their exclusive right to this codec, who in the Linux world could afford the licensing fee that would have to be paid to Sorenson? Mark Podlipec? I doubt he has the (undoubtedly) thousands of dollars the license would cost.
As to the vast market available for a native Linux version of the QT player, that's relatively unimportant to Apple. They make their money on the production tools. So, for a platform to be attractive to Apple, it's one that production houses would be using day to day to produce content.
For now, there is no real content creation platform on Linux (and I'm not talking about digital animation or rendering).
* As is generally the case, my opinions do not reflect those of my employer.
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.
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.
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.
My video compression blog
Folks,
For those curious about the details of the technologies in question, here goes. FWIW, I was a beta tester for both codecs, have taught classes with them, and cover them both extensively in my forthcoming book.
Sorenson currently sells two different codecs, Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro, and Spark Pro, both bundled with versions of their Squeeze encoding tool.
Sorenson Video 3.1 Pro is an advanced version of an encoder/decoder built into QuickTime. It's an excellent codec, with good compression efficiency, a B-frame mode that dramatically improves QuickTime streaming, and many other groovy features. All versions of Sorenson Video are QuickTime only.
Sorenson has also had a MPEG-4 codec in beta for forever (I did the first public demo of it back at QuickTime Live 2000). MPEG-4 is a superset of "baseline" H.263 (an older standard codec, designed for video conferencing), and any MPEG-4 decoder is required to also play back baseline H.263. Sorenson's MPEG-4 encoder includes a baseline H.263 encoder as well, so you can use the codec to make files compatible with H.263 decoders as well (like the Java Media Framework).
The Spark codec, which Sorenson licensed to Macromedia, and Spark Pro, the advanced encoder version included in Sorenson's Squeeze for Flash MX encoding tool, are derived from H.263, based on Sorenson's work with the MPEG-4 codec. Spark Pro is enormously better than the plain Spark incoder built into Flash - that one doesn't even let you specify a data rate.
I haven't read Apple's complaint, but I'd guess that they're alleging that parts of Sorenson Video were used to develop the Sorenson MPEG-4 codec, and which in turn wound up in Spark, which was licensed to Macromedia. I have no idea if this actually happened, or whether or not it would be permitted under their contract if it did.
Both codecs do have a number of features in common, like a configurable threshold for automatic keyframe insertion, an optional image smoothing (deblocking) filter on decode, and 2-pass VBR encoding.
Anyway, knowing as much as I do about these codecs, I feel completely unqualified to have an opinion on the legal merits of this case.
Hope this helped clarify things slightly.
My video compression blog