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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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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.
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
couldn't agree more on this. I hate that bloody app. I hate the way it seems to take over every file extension known to man even though that damn startcenter thing is disabled. It has decided that it is the default player for any audio CD's even though I specifically told it not to do that. Then it leaves the 10+MB worth of setup files in it's damn directory (even after uninstalling it!) just in case I uninstall it and ever want to use it again. And how the hell do you switch that stupid message center thing off?
Unfortunately I don't know anything else that plays realmedia and rm seems to be pretty common on the web.
If this streaming is going to become common on mobiles, then please, for the love of everything decent, DON'T USE REALMEDIA.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
QuickTime is NOT A CODEC, it's an architecture that supports HUNDREDS of graphics, sound and movie codecs - along with sundry other formats like FLASH 4, text layers, sprites etc etc etc. That's why MPEG-4 was based on it - it's fucking beautiful! So, if you 'phone had QT, you might be able to take a series of pictures, compile them into an image sequence and send them to a friend as an MPEG4 movie stream; or maybe compose a ring tone as MIDI and send it somewhere; or open a TGA or TIFF file, or a wav, mp3 or aiff file etc etc etc
That was classic intercourse!
Dude....
The problem is that this is technology for the sake of technology rather than any actual practical use. Yes live video feeds are useful but not to many people. Emergency services, surgeons... probly. Me! NO! I have NO use for this AT ALL and neither do 99% of the population.
IMNSHO The current 2G (2.5G) phone system and the handsets in use have NOT been fully exploited. There are NUMEROUS things that could have been done with that technology and ESPECIALLY the connectivity.
To see how a device can REALLY be exploited look at the GameBoy - 10 years and still new stuff is turning up. Technology for the sake of technology is pointless without software to back it up and I do not see that happening.
"None of this shit works" -W.Shatner
There may well be soon. Remember that the number of people who own mobile phones is numbered in billions.
If the trailers are free of charge or minimal charge kids, in the UK at least, will use the service and then video phone to their mates to arrange to see the film etc. etc. etc.
The issue here is for future market share available - not current market share. The estimates for increases in Linux desktop share are, I would imagine, far lower than the number of people expected to move to 3G mobile system in the next 3 years.
By getting Quicktime onto phones Apple provide a way to sell their encoders and lever Microsoft's format off of the mobile platform.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
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
The article in the Economist is(in my eyes) misleading and holds false information..'why?' you ask..well since I own a 3G Phone myself, and have done for almost a year now..I can safely say, that yes..Asia is pretty much leading the field..but if there was a second place prize..it would be given to my local telecoms company.
:)
This is their little page about the 3G network on the Island I live on. Owning a 3G, and using it day in day out, I can make a fair assessment that the technology is limited at the moment, it's still all a bit of a novelty..the handsets hold little or pointless functionality, and it only comes into its own when u plug the little thing into a USB port on a laptop/desktop. At that point, u get a broadband connection on a mobile device..I'm sure as time goes on, and technology evolves..so too will the handsets, but the main issue for 3G at the moment is that no manufacturer wants to produce 3G phones. This is due to the fact that even on a global scale..3G is relatively unheard of, and it all comes down to the old supply-and-demand..there is no point in making what people don't really want.
The US attitude is probably right at this moment, because 3G is nothing more than a toy..until it begins to get some fundamental uses rather than just to 'look cool' then its gauranteed to be successful..but at the moment..the 3G Flag flies with Asia
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 completely agree. I recently bought a new phone for my Sprint service (after the old phone decided it didn't want to work anymore). The 19-year old at Radio Shack showed me his Sprint phone, with the color screen and talked about how cool it was. Although it was cool, I could not figure out why I would need a color screen, when the phone would spend about 90% of it's time closed and the other 10% of it's time pressed against my ear.
Quicktime on a phone kind of reminds me of the new BMW 7-Series. Has anyone else seen the inside of this car? It has a new computer screen that controls every aspect of the car (audio, temperature, etc.) with a touch-sensitive, menu-driven screen. It's a neat idea, except for the fact that only an insane driver would mess with touch-screen menus at 70 miles per hour. This basic problem makes a $70,000 car about as useful as Quicktime on a phone.
Such as Apple's Quicktime?
It can support MPEG4, MJPEG, and h.XXX out of the box, and has Ogg and MPEG2 components (for both encoding and decoding) and can decode MPEG1 without any special effort.
What, exactly, is your problem? Quicktime, I believe, *is* documented. The only thorn is the Sorensen codec... which is just a codec, and not a container and not a platform.
GPL Deconstructed
I dunno...the abitily to launch surface-to-air missiles with a cellphone would be pretty groovy. (Obligatory USA PATRIOT Disclaimer: I am NOT advocating or planning any terrorist activities.)
Actually, I'm of the opinion that extra features in a cellphone generally suck. I just cancelled my web access ($5/month) on my SprintPOS (er, PCS) phone because I never use it.
Right now I want exactly TWO things from my cellphone: decent coverage area, and Bluetooth capabilities to I can use my iBook to surf from wherever and keep all my phone #s straight between my Palm, iBook, and cellphone (because I have so many floating around, I never remember them all).
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