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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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Nokia's Communicator cellphone has included RealPlayer for at least 1.5 years.
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 ...
We at doubleprick.net are pleased to announce our new and exciting range of pop-up video ads for the new generation of mobile phones. Increase your hit rates with a multmedia extravaganza that your customers will look forward to receiving. The best bit is that your customers will pay the download costs for you. They will love you for it!! Enquire today!!!!!!
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
Course, bandwidth problems come into play but imagine the possibilities...can you see me now?
3G phones currently support video playback and transfer. For example, he new J-Phone even has video capture. So the interesting bit is not that it has video, but that it's in Quicktime format.
From the article: 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.
Two things: 1. Have you ever tried to pull data off a cell phone? Especially streaming data? Security through obscurity may not be a great method, but it sure is a pain in the ass. 2. Those people who have issues with DRM should take note. If Apple continues their No-DRM policy, these phones could become the Fair-Use-Geek's first choice.
From the article: Analysts see the adoption of QuickTime by DoCoMo as a way for Apple to broaden its customer base and to have customers associate the QuickTime brand when they buy content.
I don't see this as a very good thing. Video playback should be seemless to the user. I don't want or care about codec branding. What this probably really means is that there will be an annoying Quicktime splash screen every time I open up a video (in order to have me "associate the Quicktime brand") blah.
[...] but imagine the possibilities...can you see me now?
I don't have to imagine. When I get on the train and see twenty people in my car using camera phones, it creeps me out. It'll be worse when video is used everywhere. Who knows how many people are taking pictures of you, anywhere.
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."
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!
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.
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
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
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.
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!
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
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
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.