Slashdot Mirror
QuickTime 6 Public Beta Available
krugdm writes "Apple has announced that a public beta of QuickTime 6 is now available. MPEG-4 support is there, as well as support for other technologies, such as JPEG2000, and Flash 5. The beta expires in October. An interesting in the FAQ's says that, '... because QuickTime 6 will include royalty-bearing technologies, a new QuickTime Pro key will be required to unlock pro functionality in the final release.'" It is available for Mac OS, Mac OS X, and Windows, and supports AAC audio too. I also wonder why MPEG-4 is ".mp4". ".mp3" isn't for MPEG-3, after all. Flummery!
I also wonder why MPEG-4 is ".mp4". ".mp3" isn't for MPEG-3, after all. Flummory!
Obviously they are trying to get MPEG-4 off the ground by riding on the popularity of the widly known ".mp3" file extention.
They are using a familiar "brand name" name, and mp3 is the "Coca Cola" of computers.
Just another marketing trick...
...not supposed to make any sense, just to give people that warm fuzzy feeling inside and get the royalties flowin.
"First lesson," Jon said. "Stick them with the pointy end."
It's out for MacOS, MacOS X (BSD), and Windows. Remind me again why we can't have a native Linux version of it?
Same reason you can't have Photoshop for Linux, or Microsoft Office for Linux: because the vendor wouldn't make any money off of a version of their software for Linux.
The Windows port of QuickTime is important primarily because of licensing: Apple licenses the technology to companies like Adobe so they can use it in apps like Premiere, which are more popular on Windows than they are on the Mac.
But Apple knows that Linux users, as a rule, don't buy software. No third party would license QuickTime for Linux, because they couldn't make any money on their product. So there's zero motivation for Apple to port QuickTime to Linux.
Can you imagine the sheer hell involved with getting licensing payments on Quicktime out of the hardcore Linux crowd? I mean, can you really IMAGINE it?
Do you think Apple really wants to hear all the pissing and moaning that would accompany a non-free media player?
You'd have the industry on one side, suing the life out of the company, and Slashdot on the other, dissecting it down to the bits and complaining that the third bit in the eighth word would be more secure if it was open sourced.
Sheesh!
Yup. It's a troll. I've got 49 karma and nothing to do with it. Mod away!
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
As a mac user, i'm glad they FINALLY let this thing out the door.. however, i am saddened they appear to be backing down on their claim they would not release MPEG-4 support until the per-play licensing bullshit was dropped.
.mp4s all over those file sharing services, and divx will continue to slowly take over as the average man's codec of choice..
Too bad, since apple is one of maybe two groups in the entire world capable of putting pressure on the ivory tower of the MPEG-4 patent holders.. and i was *REALLY, REALLY* looking forward to using MPEG-4, since i really hate divx. But, it looks now like we won't get to see
Why the hell did the MPEG4 people have to go and kill their own format this way??
Wrong, the QuickTime port is primarily important on Windows because otherwise it'd be a niche technology with no media available in the format. Apple have to pay for most of the cool stuff to be encoded (exclusively) in it anyway.
But Apple knows that Linux users, as a rule, don't buy software. No third party would license QuickTime for Linux, because they couldn't make any money on their product. So there's zero motivation for Apple to port QuickTime to Linux.
Apple don't make huge amounts of money from it anyway, why do you think they charge for the player, something unheard of in other media formats. Also I get sick and tired of this Linux users don't pay for anything mantra, this is not true. Many if not most serious Linux users actually pay for their distro, from that point onwards it's pretty cheap because you don't NEED to buy software, not because we won't. As it happens, I wouldn't but QuickTime even if I could (and I could, because I also use Windows), because it's basically just a media player. Why should I buy a copy of Pro when I won't need its features?
All most people use QuickTime for is playing movie trailors and the occasional "enhanced" CD. To me, that isn't worth any money, especially as the alternatives work just as well for nothing.
And how, exactly, are they making money off the "free" versions they are giving out for all of the other platforms?
Hmm. Another sighting of the infamous non-reading anonymous coward.
Apple gives away the QuickTime Player software for free. This is a neat way to increase awareness of QuickTime technology among Windows and Mac users.
Apple makes money by licensing QuickTime technology to software companies that want to incorporate it into their own products. You find QuickTime technology in apps like After Effects and Premiere from Adobe, Cinestream from Media 100, and (duh) Final Cut Pro. You can also find QuickTime technology embedded in things like digital cameras.
Apple has already done extensive work to port the QuickTime libraries to Windows and to Mac OS X from Mac OS Classic, because third party licensees asked for support for those platforms. It seems that nobody is clamoring for QuickTime for Linux except desktop users who aren't going to be buying anything any time soon.
If you really want QuickTime Player for Linux, offer to buy it from Apple. If you are willing to pay the right price, and lots and lots of other people are also willing to pay, then Apple has a case for doing the port.
Frankly, why care? You chose Win98 knowing that it is insecure and buggy. MacOS users get little sympathy when they ask for kindness because of limited availability of apps caused (supposedly) by their small market share. If you can afford to pay M$FT, you can afford to deal with this problem. Actually, maybe you should get yourself a Mac! Now with ROOT!
But Apple knows that Linux users, as a rule, don't buy software. No third party would license QuickTime for Linux, because they couldn't make any money on their product. So there's zero motivation for Apple to port QuickTime to Linux.
Could we please let this trope die? The fact is, Linux users, as a rule, don't _have_ to buy software, because there is such a vast library of free software out there. Speaking personally, however, I do buy quite a bit of software that is only available commercially, and happily do so.
If companies want to sell software to Linux users, they should try, um, selling software to Linux users. If they want to make money at it, the software should ideally be substantially different/better than the free software available for the platform. This isn't necessarily easy to do.. no one is going to be able to come out with a basic web server that is so compellingly better than Apache to get large sales on Linux. QuickTime, however, could work, due to the large body of QuickTime-specific content out there.
It may be that if Apple released QuickTime for Linux, they might not make the porting costs on it, true. But there are more Linux users this year than there were last year, and from all the news reports about new institutional commitments to Linux, I firmly expect there will be more Linux users next year than this year. At some point some brave company will discover that they can make a decent living at selling software on Linux.
They won't make it, though, if they believe that Linux users are constitutionally allergic to commercial software, when many Linux users are simply allergic to paying more for a piece of software than they have to for the competition, which is just as true in the Windows and Macintosh world.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Uh, no. Quicktime relies on a lot of the non-Unix parts of Mac OS X (e.g. the value-added, not-in-Darwin, Mac OS parts that make Mac OS X more than just another Unix).
"Instant-on" is not quite the same thing as setting your buffer size to zero. Typically, setting the buffer size to zero in a player means that there is no buffering for the entire duration of the program. This means that if you want to watch without interruptions, the available bandwidth between the server and you must exceed the bit rate of the stream at all times; since the encoding is at a variable bit rate, you will often see peaks in the bit rate which need really high bandwidth to sustain the stream.
However with "instant-on", the playback begins immediately, but the buffer continues to build. This means that you need a fairly high bandwidth initially in order to start the playback and build up the buffer, but--after that initial period--the buffer prevents interruptions which would otherwise have been caused by the peak rate of the stream going beyond the available bandwidth. So "instant-on" is not the same as setting your buffer to a fixed size of zero. Now this isn't really revolutionary; to researchers in the field the question is why everyone hasn't been doing this all along.
As an aside, the "skip protection" feature of Quicktime streaming is simply over-buffering; i.e. using the available bandwidth to build up the client buffer as much as possible instead of maintaining a fixed size buffer.
QuickTime doesn't really have any major advantages over other technologies as far as I can tell, other than it being made by Apple and therefore given lots of marketing. Why should I choose QuickTime over Real, or Windows Media, or hell even standard MPEG?
Quicktime streaming has an advantage to broadcasters: the server is open-source and free as in beer. You can download the latest snapshot via CVS, and contributions to the source from the public are welcome. The streaming protocols are all standards based (RTP/RTSP). Of course, you could always encode the data with a proprietary codec, but if you used an open codec, then the streams could be played back by any standards compliant player, not just Quicktime Player.
Finally, although ideas like "skip-protection" and "instant-on" are fairly obvious to anyone who spends some time thinking about these issues, the fact remains that only Apple seems to be taking the initiative to incorporate these into its servers and clients. What new features (from a streaming perspective) have Real and Microsoft offered in the new releases of their products? While Apple does have a big marketing push, that does not take away from the fact that there is solid work going on behind the scenes.
Er? Not even close.
MPEG-4 uses a Profile@Level structure, which strictly defines what codecs and parameters a given file can use. For example, QuickTime can export a compliant ISMA Profile 1 MPEG-1 file. This mandates the MPEG-4 Advanced Simple Video codec, either ACELP or AAC audio, maximum 352x288 resolution, and certain data rate limits.
ANY MPEG-4 player which claims to be ISMA compliant needs to be able to play this file, and QuickTime needs to be able to play an ISMA compatible MPEG-4 file created by a different vendor.
The whole point of MPEG-4 is interoperability - if that doesn't work, than the technology won't either.
For the Linux crowd, this means a MPEG-4 file will be as easy to play as a MPEG-1 is today, but with much, much improved quality at a given data rate, and support for real-time streaming. You can stop yelling at Apple about porting QuickTime, since you'll just use someone else's MPEG-4 player with their content, and it'll just work.
The risk is that support for Profile@Level combinations will vary. Certainly, a lot of cell phones use ISMA Profile 0, which means 176x144 maximum resolution, the Simple instead of Advanced Simple codec, etcetera. And there are more advanced codecs coming down the pike that improve quality, but won't work with today's ISMA profiles.
But hey, nothing that folks who deal with RPMs all day don't know about.
My video compression blog
Are you supposed to care?
Do you have to care?
Are we supposed to care?
Does every single Slashdot reader love and run Linux?
Should Slashdot abolish any noteworthy topics, and just post about Linux?
I know, it's moronic of me, this being posted on APPLE.slashdot.org and all!
Grow up, and go outside, it's almost summer time for fuck's sake. Time to tear down that RMS poster, and toss the Tux penguin you sleep with every night...
On the other hand, as Linux gains wider acceptance, becomes higher quality etc, the people using it just because it costs nothing will become an ever decreasing minority. I would be quite happy to buy software for Linux, but it'd have to be really good, something I really needed and was much better than the free version (or there was no free version). Because commercial software is relatively new to Linux though, that often isn't the case.
That'll change as Linux becomes more mainstream of course, then maybe Apple would be able to make a profit selling QuickTime Pro - but really I'd love to see their sales figures for that software. I've never actually met anyone who has it, although I've met many people who use the standard QuickTime. Considering that most people are not content creators, it seems the market for it would be fairly limited anyway.
I understand that there are a variety of reasons for commercial software's relative lack of success in the Linux market. Some people are cheapskates, some are poor, some see commercial software as morally wrong, etc., etc.
The point I think you're missing here is that bean counters don't care about any of that. They're not making value judgments about Linux users, they're simply adding up the numbers. For the sake of argument, let's say it cost VaporWare, Inc. $x to produce a Linux version of their Foo application, and it made $y. A Linux version of Foo II will only see the light of day if y is a larger number than x.
I just don't see a good business case to be made for Apple porting QT to Linux. It would be a huge effort with a minimal return on investment.
Lost: Sig, white with black letters. No collar. Reward if found!