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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.
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?
My video compression blog