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QuickTime On Your Cell Phone
blamanj writes "Apple and DoCoMo are confirming that a new version of QuickTime is on the way supporting MPEG-4 images over 3G cellular service." Now if only these would make sense in the U.S. ...
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It's nice to see the world moving forward and advancing on these technologies. We need to move forward and continue to make new things that could be used in the future but still have some commercial viability now.
It would be nice to go all out and build everything in the future but there may not be a market now and we all remember the great crash of 99-00.
But, if I get access to one of those phones then I definetly will because places are starting to wire up that offer the media that you want..._now_.
internet like monkeys'
Nokia's Communicator cellphone has included RealPlayer for at least 1.5 years.
I also wanted to add that video will be on the heels shortly as they're probably just going to use the same core as they do right now (which supports mpeg4).
Course, bandwidth problems come into play but imagine the possibilities...can you see me now?
internet like monkeys'
... but without an actual 3G network in place in the entire western world, it seems like a fairly pointless technology.
Besides, who really wants people sending video-spam to their phones?
The only reason they keep trying to add such technology to phones is so they can continue to rip you off with their charges. Do you really want to pay air-time rates to watch tiny tiny tiny movies?
Here in the UK the mobile phone companies need their clients to spend an average of £50 per month ($70-$80) just to allow them to recover from the enormous debts of the 3G licences they lumbered themselves with.
My bill is much less than that a month, and I really don't intend to use any gimicky technology they offer me to tempt me to pay them stupid amounts of cash.
Can you say iPhone?
does this mean i can watch the twin towers divx rip on my toilet?
Should be interesting to note that apple also owns this domain.
I guess this will give a whole new dimension to phone sex ...
I just hope I won't see a future where the first question when buying a phone is "Does it run Windows".
Will I be able to watch my (legally obtained, of course) DivX movies on my Nokia soon? =)
Imagine a BeoWulf cluster of 16 3G cell phones!
:)
Imagine Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets QuickTime trailer on 16 cell phones in your bedroom.
Nice
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Sure it sounds pretty neat. I can watch video full color on my cellphone but did anybody ever ask for these kinds of features. Why do they think I own a big screen TV? This whole hype mobile operators want you to follow is just an extra argument to get the money out of your pocket into theirs.
:-)
On the other hand it would be the ultimate gadget
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
I realise that I've got a personal vendetta against them, but I'm not letting anything from either Quicktime or Real media anywhere near any of my devices.
(Moral : If you want me to even consider running your software, don't have processes which run all the time... Don't change my existing file associations without asking me and don't put an icon in my taskbar.... Any others... Oh yes... If you're Maria Cantwell from RealMedia, then never ever mail me again... You can take your spam and stick it.... )
I should have stuck with my old analog phone... At least that didn't have an LCD for people to advertise at me with.
In the country where this is being marketed, there is already an "actual 3G network" in place, so this isn't pointless technology. I am currently a DoCoMo customer who happens to be in the market for a new phone, and I must say, I am quite excited about this. It will be nice to have the media that my phone uses play nicely with my iBook, unlike the format that J-Phone uses, which if sent to a computer, can only be viewed on a PC.
And this technology is not entirely useless in the US. My family happens to live there, and with this, I will be able to send them quicktime movies from my phone...sure, it is a novelty, but it sounds good to me. :D
Just my 2 yen.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Makes MMS look positively naff, why send a single picture when you can send a video stream ?
BUT if you think about the bandwidth requirements of streaming then it becomes hard for the mobile infrastructure to support.
20 million phones, say only 1% active at a time means 200,000 phones active, each streaming at 256 kilobits means 6400000 kilo bytes of bandwidth required. In other words that is 6.4 GigaBYTES of bandwith required by the mobile network.
Video is a nice idea, and for low usage it works okay within a network, but either the quality has to be crap, or the network investment has to be huge to support video-phone technology over IP. There are better compression elements out there that could work at 64 kilobits, but that is still over a Gigabyte per second network.
AND that is just for a country with only 20 million mobiles.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Knowing Apple, it'll be in Sorensen so you have to be running a WinCE phone to see anything anyways
1. Select movie to download.
2. Billed $9.99.
3. Downloading...
4. Downloading...
5. Downloading...
6. "I'm sorry, Quicktime has performed and illegal operation and will be closed. Please report this fault to Apple inc. Thank you."
Once again the porn industry is a technological pioneer.
Now if only these would make sense in the U.S...
The Economist had a great article a few months ago about 3G around the world. Asia does lead the US in 3G, and both places are way far ahead of Europe. Essentially, Europe's insistence on one standard, which worked nicely for 2G, screwed the pooch raw with 3G, that, and the fact that Asia and the US didn't license out 3G, so European cell carriers had to take on debt for billions for 3G whereas no one else did.
There's no doubt in my mind that Asia will continue leading in 3G...for the simple reason that while 3G is developing here in the US, it's been pretty hard to sell Americans on anything other than just talking on the phone. There is some cultural difference that makes Asians all giddy about spiffy 3G features, so it doesn't surprise me to see the newest and greatest 3G tech. over there.
Are there really more users who own 3G phones AND want to watch movies on them AND who will pay the horrendous bandwidth charges required than there are desktop Linux users who want to watch movie trailors? I don't think so.
My mobile usage is well over 15 minutes a day, normally around 1 hour a day.
I totally agree that if people use this then the revenues are high, but if it is low quality at the start then it will die (ala WAP, its now good but people don't care very much) and the revenues won't exist.
The problem increases when you consider that much of this is going to be cross-network interconnects so the efficent routing to average the bandwidth will be harder. I don't disagree that if they saw this money they would put the network there, but the issue is that the quality of network has to be very high before this becomes viable.
MMS is being pushed because its got low QoS issues, as long as the message gets there its okay. Streamed video is a different issue as it requires a greater QoS than the standard voice call (you can still hear the voice on a poor connection, but a poor connection == no video) which will be difficult to provide at a reasonable cost.
But without a doubt the mobile operators are going to have to get the biggest fattest pipes onto the internet, and have their own dedicated backbones to route traffic effectively. This is the internet on demand like no-one has seen it before.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
... I don't have such problem with RealOne running on my RedHat 8.0 workstation.
Airtime costs.
No, it would *not* be cool, since you wouldn't be able to make a single phone call anymore. And at least to that is what a phone should be all about...
Microsoft and Real incorporate Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology in their file format, giving companies an added feeling of security when publishing their content. This, Jones thinks, could be a disadvantage for Apple.
"The big hurdle that QuickTime has to clear is that it isn't a nicely bundled solution of video creation management and security," said Jones. "They don't have some of the content management and DRM capabilities that Real and Microsoft have."
Everyone else calls that a plus. No DRM, no security, less crap to deal with.
On another note, someone was asking whether there was truly a greater demand for this than a Linux port of QT. Perhaps there is, but also, this could be a way to pave the road for video phones.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Wow, I didn't know that!!
You could argue that you meant that 3G networks are not still in use in most, if not all, European countries. But I doubt it is a ponitless technology because until a few months we won't have it(!).
P.S. As the other aswer says, since when something is a pointless technology because you can't use it??
I like advanced technologies being put into common use appliances, but I'd like more being able to play with these devices, program them, hack them where possible and customize them.
Current cellphones are plain and simple pieces of crap. Here are just some examples of some real innovation I'd like to see in newer phones.
Why one does have to keep 5 remotes, or buy an uber expensive learning one, when any cellphone could include $ 0.5 circuitry and some lines of code might be added to make it able to learn and keep in memory IR signals?
How about including also a RF module that will open my garage door with the codes I already stored in its memory?
Why do trekkers/workers have to use walkie talkies when cellphones may be configured to allow 1v1 and switched 1vMany short range communication without any need for a repeater?
Why does one have to fight against the expensive cable/docking station when one mini USB port in a cellphone would both give standard physical I/O capabilities and enough power to recharge the batteries simply by connecting it to a PC?
Ok, and as a techie I'd like to program my cellphone in C and its devices in asm.
Make a cool device and I'll buy it, but if you try to charge me for a "service" I already do for free on my computer just because the cellphone it's smaller, you're losing your time.
I've always found quicktime on the pc to be huge and heavy, and I refuse to install it for that reason (and because they install extra services which don't go away even when you uninstall it)
I hope they've trimmed it down abit for the handheld market...
As I tried the day before WMA streaming, I could enter URLs (via the spacialaudio plugin for Winamp) into the stream and whoooom, Windows Media Player opened Internet Explorer and went to the sent URL. Isn't this one of the first possibilities to push the webpage to the user (well besides other nasty popups)?
IMHO this is a huge security gap (imagine a bunch (well let's say 10000) of WMA listeners while you send them all the same URL, nice DDoS he?) and should not be possible. Blame the WMA format?
So the player would be pre-installed, but how is it that the fattest content of all is the right candidate for phone optimization?
For truly open formats, you have to stick either exclusively to the stuff that is standardized by a standards body, or you have to go with a fully free and open codebase. 90% open doesn't count. Open stream format with the possibility of proprietary codecs doesn't count.
Apple's efforts with QuickTime are really no different from those of Real or Microsoft: they want to dominate multimedia with a format that they control. Their confusing statements about openness and relationships with MPEG4 are simply attempts to muddy the waters and confuse the issues. The best thing consumers can do is to say "no" to all of them--because otherwise consumers are going to pay the price in the long run. There are plenty of alternatives--we don't need Apple, Microsoft, or Real for multimedia.
you forgot the obligitory slashdot...
7. ???
8. Profit!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
That's thing there -- it doesn't make a lot of sense in the US. Remember, in other countries people tend to use mass transit way more than we do. Japan is an excellent example. Americans, however, commute alone via car.
So... when are we going to use a service like that to justify the massive 3g infrastructure investment? Especially when we have broadband at the office and a decent dialup at home?
Who wants a phone with pop-ups and nag screens? I just uninstalled Quicktime yesterday when I realized it now has something that runs automatically when I boot. Uninstall was faster than tracking down and disabling that "feature".
Once you know what quicktime is, you can understand why M$ wanted to kill it, and why Jobs resisted.
OT
Tell me guys, where would the porn industry be without QuickTime? QuickTime + Final Cut Pro = crusty shorts.
It is rather a shame that Apple hasn't released an official port of quicktime for linux, but the latest mplayer plays all the sorensen movies and the wmv movies. I think mplayer plays every format out there...the new LOTR trailer looks so sweet in linux...the mplayer version of qt seems to run smoother than the windows version....gotta love linux....phones should use mplayer.....lol...
http://www.mplayerhq.hu
I'm wondering where the client binary files on that site are located?? I don't want to download the source code or register for that.
We could call this equipment a name that reflects its nature - perhaps "tele", from the Latin for "far", and "vision", reflecting the visual nature of the content transmitted. Visiontele. It has a nice ring to it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
AT&T thinks they have this capability today in the US with their GSM based GPRS service. But as I see it AT&T has two challenges with customers using something like a QT6 player on a Tungsten via Bluetooth to watch movies. 1. Their GPRS network has still never delivered even 57,600 bits per second to me. 2. At $0.01 per 1024 bytes a two hour movie delivered via their network would cost me around $500 if they were capable of delivering 57600bps!
Uhhh... I think you mean Windows Media Player, not Quicktime. LOL.
"Politicians find new names for institutions which under old names have become odious to the people."
Look, I want to make phone calls with my cell phone. I want to sometimes receive them.
This is all. I don't want my cell phone to take pictures, play games, play QuickTime movies, launch surface to air missles, sing to me on lonely nights, do the jig, reminisce about the halcyon days of yore, and so on.
All this whizz bang cell phone "technology" is obnoxious and a textboox example of feature creep.
STOP THE MADNESS!
jack's bicycle is music to my ears
Maybe with the QT Ogg component, we can listen to ogg files on the cell phone!
The US screw themselves over 2G phones and suddenly people think they're world leaders.
Japan is far ahead of anyone on the 3G game, and the technology is, at least, bieng tested in teh UK and Europe.
Oh and it's not the supposed licensing that's cost the Euro companies so much, it's the fact the governments auctioned off the licences, starting at ridiculously high prices.
I'd hate to have to click through that "Upgrade Now" nonsense every time I wanted to see a little vid on my phone.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Now cellphones are PDAs, movieplayers, radios, MP3 players and what not.
What about adding a scanner, keyboard, mouse etc.
After two years of cellphone usage, I cancelled the account. Now I use it as an alarm clock and phone number book.
Tat Tvam Asi
The way they say Apple's quicktime 6 doesn't include DRM security measures makes it sound like a bad thing. Why is it that today the masses won't accept a technology without adding some ridiculous "anti-pirating" measure onto it? I think anyone should be able to play any movie regardless of who they are or where they got it.
Help a college student
can now see "download QuickTime plug-in" on their cell phones
Don't save your orgasms for Heaven; Heaven knows we need them here.
Actually, MMS is a fairly flexible standard and there's no reason why you can't send video clips over it. For, probably, a lot less money.
Will a quicktime pro add interupt you in the middle of a conversation
referenced from www.mpegla.com, this is .mp4.
.mp4 bitstreams from the
a nexus essential to both quicktime and
now if only "container" compatibility
quirks were overcome, so that things like
supposedly legal
codecs of 3ivx/divx could interoperate with
bare quicktime without explicit installation.
*distended* In Soviet Russia, line waits on Russian people.
It appears the assumption here is that not having DRM is a good thing. It may be a good thing for corporations, but it's NOT a good thing for consumers. I think consumers need to be more active in supporting non-DRM solutions so that corporations don't automatically assume DRM=good.
---
Open Source Shirts
You'll need to license over a hundred actively defended patents to play in the MP4 kiddie pool.
The standard is well and publicly specced, and this is indeed a much better thing than it being secret. But you're required to pay money even for the right to build your own from scratch.
Monty
The headline should be "3GPP support to your cell phone", and it's not all that surprising, but it's very good news for everyone (including RealNetworks, where I'm from). We've been doing a lot of work in the 3GPP, and it's great to see that work paying dividends. If you really want to find out what this stuff is about, look at the spec (and yes, I hate the fact that these are Word docs in zipfiles as much as anyone).
.mov, .mp4, and .3gp. DoCoMo's announcement was good news for 3GPP, and given the support throughout the Helix platform for 3GPP formats, codecs, and protocols, we view it as great news for the Helix Community.
Much of the confusion around this subject comes from a lack of understanding of the difference between
As another poster pointed out, only a piece of 3GPP is based on Quicktime is the container file format itself (the bit that says "here's a 3000 byte chunk of data with this 32bit codec identifier"). Another piece (the protocol) is based on work RealNetworks pioneered (RTSP). Moreover, the Helix DNA Client supports the 3GPP specification today.
RealNetworks added MPEG-4 and 3GPP support 10 months ago with the RealSystem Mobile Server (see press release),
and MPEG-4 support will be included in the Helix DNA Server when it is released in the near future.
As for the speculation about Apple releasing 3GPP encoding support, we would welcome them to the party. In early November we announced that a version of our Producer product for creating 3GPP content will ship in Q1 of 03. (see press release) Moreover, we offer our encoding framework as open source (and naturally open APIs) so that you can add support for whatever format you want to. We've given you a head start by implementing Ogg Vorbis support.
Again, the new phones sound great. Lots of new devices for Helix encoders and servers to work with.
current phones have something like 128x160 pixel screens... so you can be very cheap-ass with the data rate.
;)
seems like you could do a lot less than 256k...
hey.. all of a sudden, stamp-sized video starts to make sense..
Did they make that into a movie or something?? Damn exploitational swine.