Slashdot Mirror
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."
When will more hardware venders start waking up to the idea, that working with standard and open protocols will be the most profitable in the long term. Why pay someone like Microsoft millions when you can own your own or share instruction set for far less?
Who owns your data?
This way we could have OGG for audio and MPEG4 for video. Current MEDIA processors are very advanced and low cost. So computation power wont be a bottleneck if a standard is evolved which uses both OGG and MPEG-4. M$ may be king in OS domain, but in the Chip and Digital entertainment industry its the likes of TI/Intel/ST etc which rule the roost... and they are going to push for all its worth.
In fact it is a very good thing. Normally hardware guys are not so touchy about software rights(most of the times) they are concerned with mostly selling hardware and if you buy hardware you get most software goodies for free.My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
Interesting thing about that MPEG4 'standard.' There isn't one. MPEG4 for mobile devices is a lot different than MPEG4 for desktop computers, which is a lot different than MPEG4 for the professional video market. With every new iteration of MPEG, there's some company trying to shoehorn their proprietary standard into it so they can collect money on their intellectual property in licensing fees.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, while these companies fight tooth-and-nail with each other to get every little piece of tech they can into each 'standard,' they're all hoping that Philips doesn't come along and price the technology out of a reasonable profit margin.
I'm biased in that I work for Xiph, but selling a technology based on 'If you don't buy our crap, Microsoft will own your asses' is not exactly a proper technical evaluation criterion. It's like saying, 'Please buy Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, or TWIX WILL RULE THE WORLD!'
This is technology, not a run for Student Council. Whatever happened to releasing better technology and pimping the hell out of it? Sigh.
Emmett Plant
CEO, Xiph.Org Foundation
Go get yourself some free music.
Simple - Because QuickTime is the basis for the Mpeg-4 file format.
Why is QuickTime the basis for Mpeg-4?
Because it provides a far far richer way to describe a media file.
Personally, I like being able to keep subtitles as a text track embedded in a file, or make simple edits on gigs of source data, and send a 900k file containing the edits to a friend (who already has the source data) rather than have to render the whole sequence out to a flat file.
I'm wondering.
...
The I-Motion service mentioned in the second article is a video on demand service. What videos would users demand ?
The next paragraph tells us that 100K was the maximum size until now, which results to about 15 seconds of video. The new MP4 standard would allow around 400K or 45 seconds.
You might be able to download a weather report as a video, or the finish of an important car race or something, but I don't see the point of 45 seconds moveis. It's not like you can watch the newest movei on your cellphone (not that I want to) or the news (since that's a little to long)
Linux hosting for $2.50/mo
So you can run Quicktime on your random OSed cellphone, but not your Linux PC?
Why don't they support the "alternative" OS crowd yet? It's obviously not for technical reasons...
I can only presume Apple thinks Quicktime is so important that Linux users will "switch" to Mac just to just it.
Real Networks has open sourced some of its code, creating the Helix Community. Also, the Helix Server is able to stream RealVideo, Quicktime, Windows Media and MPEG-4 from a single server running on a Linux box! Try that with any other server.
There are many patents which cover the various codecs that make up mpeg4 (no, mpeg4 is not really a standard, there are just a bunch of formats that roughly look something like each other and we call them mpeg4). MPEG4 will never be free from patents. For this reason, I suggest we start doing what we can to help xiph.org finish up with theora, which has a 1.0 release currently scheduled in June, 2003.
By "help" I mean do whatever you can. If you can code, great, if not, perhaps you can spare a few pennies?
--
grep "xercist"
A lot of people seem to dislike Quicktime, bashing it as slow, buggy or just not feeling right on the Windows platform... like it's kind of not meant to be there or something...
I fully understand these comments, QT on Windows is not too good (although I still prefer it to WMP). So it's so much more of a shame that on OSX QT is a totally different app - it works pretty damn well, and QT6 is fairly remarkably good. I have all three main media players on my Mac, WMP, RealOne, and QT, and you really do notice the difference when you are forced to use WMP or RO, buggy choppy playback now and then, nasty interfaces, streaming doesn't work as well, no instant on streaming etc.
Apparently QT is the number 1 downloaded media player, and this is great, but Apple should get the Windows port up to scratch, and show the Windows guys a little something about Apple's quality.
As for mobile phone related media - I think Apple saw this coming all along, I mean look at their recent courting of Sony Ericsson (sp?) at the Macworld expo, they had the CEO of the group up to talk, and exclusively showed off the T68i. I think Apple wants a piece of this market, and we'll be seeing them diversify more and more (as they have been doing very well recently at both ends of the scale, with the iPod and XServe, both new products in new areas for the company.).
This sig has been deprecated.
Apple has been quite aggressive with its quicktime technology. By choosing to host all major motion picture trailers, it has made a good move. I always go for the quicktime trailer rather than windows media trailer. I get to play (ffw and rwd) with my quicktime trailers, whereas for the windows media trailer, once it's looped it has to start from the beginning.
All players play mp3z these days. The why choose winamp over sonique? That's why, I think this article makes sense. I would be happier to see quicktime on my mobile, rather than MS.
|/________
|\A|ALYS|
From Microsofts's site: "Microsoft and MPEG-4 Many companies have contributed to the development of MPEG-4. Microsoft has also been a supporter of this development process for some time, particularly in the video area. Microsoft has made more than 100 formal contributions to the MPEG-4 standardization process and has patents that are relevant to MPEG-4 video implementations. While Microsoft continues to support the MPEG-4 standardization process, it is moving forward with the development of audio and video technologies that deliver superior quality and an end-to-end streaming solution for Microsoft customers." I don't think WMP supports MPEG-4 currently. Microsoft doesn't like open standards, as illustrated in the previous paragraph.
DRM is NOT necessary. There was no such thing as ANALOG rights management, and there's no impetus other than corporate lust for control behind DIGITAL rights management features.
The MPEG formats are the closest thing we have to an open and widespread media format -- less restrictive than Windows Media, RealNetworks, or the Sorenson parts of QuickTime, and far more popular than open-source efforts like OGG.
I agree there should be a unified media format, and for highly compressible streaming media MPEG4 seems to be the best choice.