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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!
It's out for MacOS, MacOS X (BSD), and Windows. Remind me again why we can't have a native Linux version of it?
Is your browser retarded?
One of the coolest things they demoed for Quicktime 6 was no-wait streaming, where there's no pause while the frames get buffered. You can even scrub back and forth over the timeline, streaming. Combined with an Xserve dishing out >500 simultaneous DVD-quality quicktime streams, Quicktime is looking pretty sweet. Now why don't more sites start using it?
You drank my drink, you drunk!
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."
Quote from the site:
Wow, Apple's coming out with some cool stuff lately! :)
- Steve
In other words, this has the ability to kill all the crap about "you need FOO player to see this video".
I also wonder why MPEG-4 is ".mp4". ".mp3" isn't for MPEG-3, after all.
.mp4 for MPEG-4 makes much more sense than .mp3 for MPEG-2 Layer 3, in hindsight. (How many .mp2 files do you have laying around?)
That's because geeks at some hoighty-toighty European institute created the MPEG-2 Layer 3 format and file extension, while Steve Jobs wrote Quicktime 6 and it's file extension, all by himself, "out of one, solid block of wood."
Or it could be because
"And like that
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"Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly"
Now Qt 6 is released, the KDE team can start working on KDE 6 !
Yea, but I'm a vi kind of guy...
Hey Pudge, did you mean flummery?
flummery (flm-r) n. pl. flummeries
I'm pretty sure you did...
Hey! It appears to work fine with CodeWeaver's CrossOver Plugin for Linux.
I just installed and ran it.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
This is great. Quicktime should now be able to play XviD and DivX video. XviD especially. That's nice.
I was really hoping Apple would move more towards Free formats, however. AAC has good quality, but it's a nightmare of licensing restrictions. It looks like I'll still have to go to the QuickTime Components Project for Ogg Vorbis and exa-mozilla MNG support. All of my music is in Vorbis, and my movies convereted to OGM from AVI and MOV containers. OGM is a really nice container. No sync or seek problems at all. You can embed XML streams, for whatever purpose you'd like.
Even more importantly, QuickTime still doesn't have a lossless audio compression codec. Some FLAC would be nice. It really looks like FLAC might be moving closer to the Ogg project.
I mean, hey, unless Apple is going to make a car stereo system, this is probably the best component to plug into an OS X "digital hub." It does FLAC, with the new firmware.
Still, the ability to play XviD (valid MPEG-4 video) is a great step in the right direction. Kudos.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
While this is great news, also note that a Public Preview of Quicktime Broadcaster is out.
t er
This allows you to encode video (for free) for delivery to a streaming server.
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/preview/broadcas
"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.
Yet Another Quote from Apple:
Divx might be a valid MPEG-4 codec, but they apparently don't use the MPEG-4 file format.
Contrary to popular perception, the primary problem with DivX support on macs is not lack of the proper codecs. There are actually three different DivX codecs for mac (the 3ivx, DivX, and ffmpeg projects - however windows media audio, which some files use, is only indirectly supported via DivX doctor). The real problem is quicktime's inability to read AVI files with variable bitrate audio encoded into them (vbr support was not part of the original official spec, and microsoft has since declared the format "obsolete" in favor of windows media). This has been a problem with quicktime for years, and they STILL haven't fixed it in QT6 preview, despite rumors to the contrary. The only solution is to extract the audio and video tracks and stick them together in quicktime format, using one of a variety of tools (see the sites above). DivX.com claims to have come up with an elegant hack around the issue, but they have yet to release it. Video LAN client claims to be able to play back DivX avis without doctoring, but doesn't work well at all yet.
The good news is you can play back just about any DivX file out there. The bad news is you're going to have to do a little more work than just downloading Quicktime and expecting it to play - You have to go get and install the DivX codecs yourself, and turn all your DivX AVIs into MOVs with the proper tools. I can only assume the Quicktime crew could have fixed this vbr AVI problem if they wanted to a long time ago, and possibly did - but for undisclosed reasons, they choose not to or aren't allowed to release or work on it.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
It's not open source (DivX _is_ - libavcodec). There is no Linux version. Why should I care?
No. MPEG4 is not "DVD Quality" Its FAR SUPERIOR to DVD.
I don't think that's really a very accurate statement, in any frame of reference.
There exist some extremely high quality MPEG-2 encoders. Some of them are used to produce DVDs-- particularly of the Superbit variety-- and some are used to compress over-the-air HDTV. These are a far cry from the software encoders some people use to generate movies on their PCs.
MPEG-4 is still very immature. It's impossible to fairly compare MPEG-4 encoding to MPEG-2 encoding in any meaningful way. Especially when you fail to control for data rates.
The only remotely objective comparisons of MPEG-4 to MPEG-2 I've seen to date have taken MPEG-2 source material (usually from DVD) and re-encoded it with MPEG-4. That doesn't really tell you anything. I haven't had the time, or the gear, to take uncompressed reference material and pass it through MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoders. That's a test I'd like to see.
What it sounds like you're saying is that bad MPEG-4 encoding is superior to bad MPEG-2 encoding. I won't argue with you there. But that's not sound basis for making a blanket judgment like yours.
You can create an Applescript applet which will set movies to full screen mode. Then all you need to do is drop the quicktime movie onto the applescript. I believe apple has written this applescript themselves, it should be available somewhere on their quicktime or applescript areas.