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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.
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.