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Quicktime 6 Becoming Mobile-Phone Standard?

Posted by chrisd on from the japanese-people-have-cool-cell-phones dept.

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."

16 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. For more information... by tigress · · Score: 5, Informative

    See this link.

    1. Re:For more information... by HoneyBunchesOfGoats · · Score: 5, Funny

      Yes, definitely check this link out. And while you're at it, repost some of the discussion's comments! Instant Karma!

  2. It's about MP4, not Quicktime 6 by silentbozo · · Score: 5, Informative

    MPEG-4 is the open standard that they're adopting. That Quicktime 6 has support for MPEG-4 is incidental, and not at all the core issue. After all, if the mobile phones actually supported Quicktime, they'd be able to play a lot more than just MPEG-4.

  3. Actually... by tigress · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I believe both Windows Media Player and Quicktime 6 are perfectly able to play MPEG4, which is kindof the point of this story.

  4. when will the rest wake up? by mudpup · · Score: 5, Interesting


    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?
  5. Oh great. by blumpy · · Score: 5, Funny

    Not sure which is better, Quicktime player that crashes my phone half the time and nags me to pay to upgrade it everytime I make a phone call, or a Windows Media Player on my phone that updates itself with pyschedelic screen patterns, making it slower and slower each time...

  6. misleading by tanveer1979 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.
    --
    My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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    1. Re:misleading by Zathrus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  7. What fun! by Emmettfish · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "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.

  8. yes,propriatry Apple is better then propritary MS! by autopr0n · · Score: 5, Informative

    Don't act like apple is some kind champion of open standards or something, they've been trying to cram QuickTime down everyone throats for years... and while the format itself may be open, some of the codecs are not (Sorensen Anyone?).

    A lot of my dislike of QuickTime has to do with their shitty, buggy, windows viewer program (after all this time it still can't do full screen, wtf!?). But in all seriousness I know my life would be a lot nicer if everyone used truly open, independent file formats and codecs.

    Apple is just as guilty of playing the proprietary crap game in terms of video as Microsoft, if not more so.

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  9. Re:What to do!? by Pathwalker · · Score: 5, Informative

    You know - once you install QuickTime, you don't have to use the player Apple provides.

    They have full documentation available on the file format, and programming applications that use it for both MacOS as well as windows.
    Heck - when I visited developer.apple.com to pick up the links, their ad was for a 5 volume set of books on writing programs that use QuickTime.

    So, if you don't like it, download the docs, and write your own.

  10. Incredibly misleading headline (again) by robla · · Score: 5, Informative
    Time to cut and paste my response from a couple of days ago...

    The headline should be "3GPP Becoming Mobile-Phone Standard", 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).

    Much of the confusion around this subject comes from a lack of understanding of the difference between .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.

    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.

  11. Re:OK, let's share experiences by Pathwalker · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. 3GPP, not MPEG-4 by robla · · Score: 5, Informative
    It's even more misleading than you give it credit for. MPEG-4 is a very big spec, of which the ".mp4" part is only a small chunk. DoCoMo announced 3GPP support, which takes some parts from MPEG-4, but takes other parts from IETF and ITU specs.

    Regarding Ogg + MPEG-4 video. The licensing terms for MPEG-4 Video are pretty gnarly. How about Ogg and H.263+ (which, incidently, is what the 3GPP standardized on). That combination nearly works today in Helix DNA Client. We're already committed to making this available in our mainline products like RealOne Player and Helix Universal Server.

  13. Real Video 9 by Paulo+Rocha · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

  14. Re:Standards... by doctor_oktagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.