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."

Comments

when will the rest wake up?

[mudpup]

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?

misleading

[tanveer1979]

the article is a bit misleading. Actually it is MPEG-4 which is being pushed. MPEG-4 is pretty save standard. Lots of chip vendors are incorporating it and this will kind of save it from patent troubles. As of now there is no liscensing/patent problem for this. If MPEG-4 is adopted as an industry standard it will be a big win for consumers..... Now only if they adopted ogg too!

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.

What fun!

[Emmettfish]

"Please use our ham-fisted standard so that the other guys with a different ham-fisted standard won't win the Battle of the Ham-Fisted Standards."

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.

Re:OK, let's share experiences

[Pathwalker]

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.

Real Video 9

[Paulo Rocha]

You people seem to be forgetting about Real Video 9, which is the best video codec nowadays. It's proprietary, but Real Networks has been making clients for many OSs, UNIX family included -- something that neither Apple nor Microsoft have done.

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.