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Quicktime 6 Becoming Mobile-Phone Standard?
k-hell writes "It seems like Apple's QuickTime 6 is becoming standard on some 44 million Japanese mobile phones. Apple and many other companies are pressuring hard to make MPEG-4 the industry standard for video-on-demand services in 3G cellular networks, and to keep Microsoft and its proprietary Windows Media out of the mobile phones market."
I believe both Windows Media Player and Quicktime 6 are perfectly able to play MPEG4, which is kindof the point of this story.
Hey there. Please place the crackpipe down, and listen to me for a moment. MPEG-4 is not a 'safe' standard. Hell, it's not even a standard. It is the same proprietary crap you've been spoon-fed for the past ten years (or more), but with a lot more companies involved, looking for their piece of the action. How will they get at it? Oh, yes. With patents. Quelle surprise.
If you really want people like Texas Instruments to do something that would make a lot more sense, you would push for them to release an expanded line of DSP's and hardware that is container and codec agnostic. Demand more from your chips. Don't tell TI 'design a chip for MPEG-4,' tell them to stop making chips that require hideously expensive compilers and NDA's.
The biggest win for the consumer is a chip manufacturer that lets the consumer decide, not a chip manufacturer that does what it's told by Dorky Portable Magazine.
I don't want TI to make chips that just support Ogg. I want TI to make chips that support stuff today, and give me at least a fighting chance on supporting tomorrow's Codec du Jour. People freak out if they buy a home computer that won't last them for a year. I encourage people to think the same way about their portable technology, as well. You shouldn't settle for less, and you shouldn't buy from companies that do, either.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.org Foundation
Quicktime 6 is a container format defined by Apple that might be used with a huge number of proprietary codecs, as well as a software infrastructure implementing multimedia encoding, decoding, and transport using that format; saying that something uses "Quicktime 6" doesn't tell you much about whether you can read it or not; it's like knowing that you can plug into a wall socket without knowing that the voltage is right.
MPEG4 generally refers to a specific bitstream based on a specific, standard set of codecs. Apple's Quicktime 6 happens to be able to represent MPEG4, but that's where the relationship ends. The difference between Quicktime 6 and MPEG4 is the difference between being able to encode and decode streams or not.
If phone manufacturers are actually using Quicktime 6, with multiple codecs and all, then that's a major victory for Apple and a major loss for open source and interoperability. If phone manufacturers are actually using MPEG4 but Apple calls it "Quicktime 6" for PR reasons, then that's a major PR victory for Apple, but it is hard to see what that kind of usage of MPEG4 has to do with Apple. In fact, a lot of video-based devices are already using MPEG4.
In fact, the NetworkWorldFusion article suggests that the latter is the case: NTT is switching specifically to MPEG4, not to Quicktime 6. And that's actually good.
Thats a very US-centric view.
Try using a mobile phone in a country where everyone doesn't drive, like the Far East.
Or even here in the UK. Enough of us spend enough god-foresaken hours on trains and in brain-dead jobs, so the simple pleasure of a whizzy mobile phone is immeasurable.
It's this attitude (well, along with geographical spread) which makes the US the least-developed for mobile services.
Uh... it's all about cost.
TI has general purpose DSPs and CPUs available that can do whatever you need today as well as a good bit of what you may need tomorrow. Of course, you're going to pay for that flexibility - not only in price, but also in size, power consumption, and heat.
This is why purpose-specific DSPs are so popular in the marketplace, particularly the portable one. Lessee... I can build a device that can be reprogrammed to read any number of formats, but it's going to have twice the build cost and a quarter the battery life. Oh, and if I'm reading from a small media format like SecureMedia, then my chip layout has just doubled the size of the device because the chip's so much bigger now.
Or I can just go buy that MP3/WAV/Orange book chip over there, which is half the price, has competitive power consumption, requires less design (don't have to bother with updates, with coding other formats, etc), and will fit into my micro-sized device.
Which one do you think companies go for?
There are plenty of general purpose DSPs/CPUs. There are plenty of slightly specialized ones as well (which is more likely to be what you want anyway). But they all have tradeoffs. For the portable market the upside almost never makes up for the downsides. The standalone unit is different, and that's why you see devices like the Turtlebeach Audiotron, Rio Receiver, etc. with more powerful CPUs/DSPs.
Oh, and as for your NDA/compiler issue -- most don't have horrendous NDAs unless you get them in the pre-release cycle. And a lot use GCC for a compiler too, since it's a helluva lot cheaper to do what's necessary to cross-compile with a proven compiler than it is to create your own from scratch.