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Apple Acquires Silicon Grail
mac writes "Silicon Grail's web site has an interesting update: it has been acquired by Apple. Their product RAYZ and Nothing Real's Shake are the two major products, as far as compositing software goes. Nothing Real was bought by Apple also back in February. With both companies held by Apple, who will fill the void in the Windows and Linux?"
Here's what it is.
Better writeups, please.
I have been pwned because my
There are no shortage of video editors out there and a quick search of Sourceforge for "video editing" shows a good chunk of projects rolling along.
No Zen is good zen
There is no Quicktime for Linux.
Unless I missed some big story in the last week or so...
I wish I had a kryptonite cross, because then you could keep Dracula and Superman away.
It might be time to go BSD - MacOS X BSD. I sincerely doubt that anyone involved in video production gives a fuck about the "free" or otherwise nature of the license anyway.
MacOS X - the unix for people who bathe daily.
Actually, the PRO compositing field is dominated by windows. Discreet's PRO boxes (inferno & flame, both with a 6 figure+ price tag) run win2k, and Avid|DS only runs on windows. The thing is, the big studios (ILM for ex.) typically use their own proprietary compositing systems.
From an earlier article on the fate of Shake :
``Apple has declared that Irix and Linux versions will be developed at least through 2003.''
To me that suggests that there is no Linux void yet. Also, the fact that they say they will keep developing for those Unices but not for MS Windows suggests that perhaps they will Go Unix with this, which they can do thanks to Mac OS X's Unix roots (kudos to NeXT for coming up with this brilliant idea).
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Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Of course he means QuickTime 2, not Windows 2.0.
Nope, you've got it backwards. QuickTime on OS9 was an extension, which you could readily disable and remove, and as such no part of the standard MacOS toolbox relied upon it. (QT on OSX is a little more integrated but the historical separation remains, QT is built on top of the toolbox, not vice versa.)
QuickTime uses the Mac toolbox fairly heavily -- it's not about media compression, it's about time-based playback of media. Compressing and decompressing is just something you -sometimes- need to do as part of this. A lot of the code is getting it from the uncompressed format to the screen/speakers in a timely manner. It uses windows, threads, events, timers, component manager, resource manager, file manager, sound manager, just to name a few. As some other folks said, they basically ported a good chunk of the MacOS Toolbox to Windows to make it work.
I won't argue too much with that one. I should point out that one of the reasons they didn't port it was because as big as it might seem to some young'uns
They ported the Mac toolbox to Darwin first - aka Carbon. Then, and only then, they brought over QuickTime, building it on top of Carbon. You'd have to port a large part of Carbon to Linux. Mind you, it would be possible, but there probably isn't a large perceived ROI for the time involved.
I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind extending their media-player dominance to another consumer desktop platform, but Linux (and *BSD) are not consumer desktop platforms yet. When binary distributions become more feasible and the userbase grows, that's when you might see QT for Linux.
(former Apple engineer)
Everything you said is wrong :).
QuickTime 2 was the first version for Windows. It was playback only - authoring required a Mac. It wasn't really a port, just a player library that could do QT files.
QuickTime 3 for Windows was a ground-up new version that supported Authoring. Since QuickTime for Mac had huge dependcies on the underlying MacOS "Toolbox" for QT3 for Windows they actually ported over a huge portion of the MacOS APIs so it could run. It was complete enough that Apple had to specifically request software vendors not use QuickTime as a Mac to Windows porting library. And some still did, like Media Cleaner Pro 4.
QuickTime is a whole media architecture. It does compression, sure, but lots of other stuff. It is a major enabling technology for video editing, and also does panoramas, audio playback, etcetera. Its complexity is on the same order of magnitude as the Linux kernel.
Apple doesn't get any money from QuickTime licenseing. While you need to license the installer from them, it is free as in beer. You just need to send them two copies of your disc for regression testing against new versions of QT.
QuickTime for MacOS X is Carbon, which means it uses the port of the Mac toolbox for MacOS X (in the same way it uses is own internal port on Windows). Porting it to Linux would require porting this as well. This is far from trivial - QuickTime needs to talk directly to low level hardware like sound cards, clocks, video cards, etcetera. This aren't things that are well unified under Linux. QuickTime is extremely heavily tested by a large testing team. So even if they did it, they'd have to pick a few Linux flavors to test against. The kinds of things QuickTime does are the kinds of things that break on random distributions.
I've heard that the Windows port took something over 100 engineer years, and I imagine Linux would take at least as many. That's, VERY rough ballpark, $20M.
Think Apple could see an additional $20M in net revenue from having a Linux port?
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