QuickTime 7 Released, HD Movie Trailers Available

mmarlett writes "The long-anticipated release of Tiger has brought with it QuickTime 7, which was available on Thursday separately from Tiger, but not yet available for anything other than Mac OS X. That's to be expected, but as I was checking out the recent trailers for Batman Begins and Serenity, I realized that they (along with many other things) were also available as giant H.264 HD Quicktime files that require QuickTime 7. Makes me wish I had that 30" display."

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John Siracusa on Quicktime 7 in Ars Technica

[babbage]

For much more excellent detail on Quicktime 7, go read the relevant section of John Siracusa's in-depth Tiger review for Ars Technica. From his description there, Quicktime 7 seems to be a radical & long overdue redesign of Quicktime that wouldn't be possible without some of the architectural changes that OSX 10.4 has delivered, particularly Quartz 2D Extreme and CoreImage. To quote from Siracusa's Quicktime analysis:

Despite the ongoing annoyance of the "QuickTime Pro tax," QuickTime 7 is the most important upgrade to QuickTime in the Mac OS X era. It solves long-standing architectural problems, leverages several of Tiger's other new technologies to do things only dreamt of by QuickTime 6 and earlier, includes its own best-of-breed video codec, and is finally embraced by Cocoa. The new QuickTime Player is good enough to be in danger of reinforcing the (largely uninformed) folk wisdom in the Mac community that rewriting an application in Cocoa automatically makes it better. QuickTime 7 has been a long time in coming, but it has turned out to be well worth the wait.

(And if Apple feels like there's nothing left to do for QuickTime 8 except produce plug-ins for the alphabet soup of audio and video codecs, subtitle tracks, and container formats used by those inscrutable Anime fansubbers, you won't hear me complaining...)

The changes to Quicktime 7 seem to be drastic enough that I'm a little surprised that they were able to get QT7 to work at all on previous versions of OSX, not to mention Windows. Presumably, the new APIs had to be at least partially encapsulated and backported to Panther and will have to be crossported to Windows. That, in turn, has me wondering if it will be possible to use Quicktime to write software on Panther or Windows that takes advantage of these new tools -- probably not, but it's tantalizing.

Anyway, Siracusa's reviews of Panther and previous versions have been consistently excellent, going way more in depth than any other reviews of the system have done. These articles should be considered required reading for anyone that wants to really understand OSX.

Re:Good...progressive.

[dr.badass]

For the rest of the conversation I will assume that Apple changed the qt format, as I never had any problems playing quicktimes before.

QuickTime is a container format, that can, er contain many different codecs. In this case, the codec in question is H.264, which is currently only available in QuickTime 7. Same format, new codec.

Lastly I would like to ask the Mac experts about H.264. It seems that this codec is nothing new, and ffmpeg has supported it for a couple of years now.

ffmpeg might have had H.264 decoding support for a while, but definitely not " a few years", and encoding is till pretty fresh. As in : BIG FAT WARNING: x264 is still in early development stage. (Also, many of the other existing H.264 implementations don't follow the spec, and do stupid things like use AVI containers.)

Why could this not be placed into an older qt version? Or is it just that it was not?

A little of both, with a dose of marketing. QuickTime was showing it's age -- QuickTime 6's MPEG-4 implementation was a joke, mostly because of assumptions made with QuickTime 1 that no longer hold true.

The marketing comes in when you consider that the installed base of QuickTime users is more likely to upgrade if you go on about HD and pristine quality and fast downloads than APIs and architectures. It's a lot easier to get people to upgrade when you have a carrot to dangle in front of them.

Why H.264 is such big news?

The news is that it is now supported natively by a popular content creation platform, with an installed content delivery platform that is (IIRC), second only to Flash. This means that you can create H.264 content and have the reasonable expectation that people will be able to view it.