Game company A makes a windows game and sells a few million copise. Game publisher B sees this, pays company A to let them port the game and company C to do the actual porting.
The mac publisher (Like Aspyr, Macplay, or Destineer) has to pay for the game license, and for the porting company (Westlake, Omnigroup, or a few others) so that they can finally sell a few thousand copies of the game to mac users. In addition, of course, to paying royalties on the sales they DO make (in addition to the initial licensing fee) and support for the mac version.
Most ports require very little effort by the PC developers and publishers, but a LOT of effort and capital by the porting publisher themselves. This is why Loki went out of business. A hit with a 5% install base will give you just about enough money to pay for your next release. That's a really tough way to sustain development.
What Linux needs (and mac needs more of) are native, top-quality developers making mac and Linux first games. Ambrosia Software comes to mind on the mac; although they use a shareware business principal, their games are easily on the same level as most commercial offering. Bungie (of Halo fame/infamy) started out as the Mac's most popular/famous developer before they began first cross-developing with windows, and then being purchased by Microsoft for XBox development.
Companies like this are equivalent to exclusive releases to consoles. You have to have games that you can't get any other way.
What linux needs is developers making great linux games. Games that make windows gamers install linux just to play in the same way people buy an Xbox to play Halo.
They ARE doing some things like this, a good part of it is just focused on high school education.
I'm part of a team for the FIRST robotics competition. It's a national competition where engineers team up with high schoolers to build large-scale remote controlled robots to compete with each other. These things can get expensive, but it gives the high schoolers a chance to work with pretty complex machining and control systems.
Ford, GM, NASA, Delphi, Microsoft, and many other big technology companies sponsor teams. You end up with some really innovative designs for the weird games we get every yet, and the kids learn way more about engineering than they ever would otherwise.
The robots range from the cheap - like ours, at maybe two thousand for parts and built by college engineering students - to the incredibly expensive - Big corporate teams like Ford or Delphi have a team of professional engineers whose entire job for six weeks is to build an expensive, but fine-looking machine.
So, while I'd like to see some really high tech neat things come out of US companies, they are doing SOME things just for the coolness factor.
www.usfirst.org --> main website http://techclasses.dublincoffman.com/dubl infirst/ --> my (the Ohio State University/ Dublin High Schools) team's site
The problem isn't the idea of teaching computing at an early age, it's that of all the teachers in the school, maybe one understands more than how to check their email.
My mother teachers at a k-6 school in a low-income neighborhood. Their text books are ancient, but thanks to a state grant, every room has five top of the line computers (for 20 elementary students). I look at that and say, WONDERFUL. I would have LOVED to have that technology in class.
Then I look at how thick the dust is on them. The kids only use them during play time, or indoor recess to play educational games. The teachers use it for email.. maybe, half the time not even that. To many of them, the concept of double-clicking is as confusing as calculus would be to their students. The teachers don't use the computers to teach anything, especially not computing, and therefore they are a waste.
If schools want to invest money in computers, they should invest something into teacher training and make technology PART OF THE CURRICULUM. Teachers don't know computers because they don't care, and so they don't, won't, and can't teach them. They don't see technology, or in elementary, often even science, as important. And so.. the kids get $1500 game systems that they can use twice a day, and they learn how to click a mouse. Woohoo.
No offense, but being used by the popular kids is going to do nothing to help either of them.
The popular kid might respect him as intelligent, in the same way they respect a dictionary. But they won't care about him as a person. As for the smart kid, all he'll ever get out of that kind of group work is the knowledge that others will only slow him down.
The way to make group work useful for development is to make *him* dependent on his group, and not hating that fact. This only happens when his peers are as competent as he. Put him in a group that will actually take him farther than he would have gone on his own, and he'll learn something. Otherwise all he'll learn is how to get people to shut up and let him do his work.
All of the other possible cameos are completely impossible. There was a HUGE gap in time between The Hobbit and LotR, on the order of 70 years. That would have left Aragorn a young child, Arwen living in Lothlorien with her mother's people, and Barliman, the young hobbits, and possibly Gimli not even born.
Not to say that Jackson might not do it anyway, but it just wouldn't make sense if he did.
I go to Ohio State University, and for the past week I and most people I have know have been receiving these message from
staff@osu.edu.
That's over 30,000 users, right there, on broadband. Multiply that by every campus in the world... I was honestly even curious about it, until I saw the attachment file. Their biggest weakness in it, actually, was that it sent several copies, each with a different user@osu.edu. That made it more suspicious.
are eclipsed or lessened by working in a mostly PC environment?
Mac OS hasn't cared whether I name my picture fluffy_bunny.jpg or "I saw the cutest bunny the other day!!!" for the over ten years I've been using it, but I still remember to stick file extensions after everything I make because I *know* at some point I'm going to have to send it to a windows user.
Setting up a small appletalk network involves two things: plugging in a cable (to the auto-configuring ethernet port that doesn't require crossover cables for direct connections that every mac has had for the last five years and I still can't find on a PC), and flipping two checkboxes: "Turn appletalk on" and "Turn file sharing on." Yet if I want to transfer files or play a networked game, I still need to setup an ad hoc TCP/IP network and figure out how to set up a workgroup on my friend's system: I've honestly managed to setup windows file sharing on my mac twice as fast as I could on my windows box.
And I can't open.doc files because I'm on a mac, I can't open.doc files because I MS Office is expensive and I don't like the interface. I don't use it on my PC either; if people just figured out to send files in a free format, I wouldn't have a problem on either system.
I have hours of examples of favorite mac features that I almost never get to use because no one else I know uses a mac. Almost all reasons to use windows, from initial price to software availability, stem from the same source; everyone else has it, and you're going to have to deal with everyone else at some point.
Anything that requires high bandwidth will not like working on the hub. USB was not designed for high data rate transfers and divides bandwidth *equally* among all devices. That's right, if you have your DJ and your mouse plugged into USB 2.0 to transfer, they both get equal bandwidth.
That's why a lot of devices dislike hubs. No idea if this is the case on the Rio, though.
And as for 6 USB ports, the whole point of the damn interface is that you wouldn't need that many ports. Also, it's 6 USB if you get the case with the front port and take up one of your PCI slots with an adapter. Sure, the motherboard SUPPORTS 6 ports, but I've never had any reason to take up space with all of them.
The whole point of USB was hot-pluggable chainable (or hubbable, however you want to say that) external device management for low bandwidth devices. The fact that new motherboards have to come with 6 ports to make it useful for most things is a testament to the stupidity of trying to expand this standard to high-speed devices.
If I want high speed, I want IEEE1394. Period.
I don't think any fan honestly complains about these movies for what they left out. I mean, sure, we'd like to see the scouring of the shire, and Bombadil and whatnot, but it's a movie, and it's really freaking long already.
What ticks off fans of the books is when their favorite characters or moments are mauled just to make the movie different. Faramir was, in the books, Aragorn's near-equal, a good man living in the shadow of his supposedly greater brother, but who turned out to be the best in the end. Denethor was similar, in the Appendices he was described as one of the greatest captains of Gonder in ages, and his exploits would have been legendary had they not been second to another captain of Gonder (Aragorn, then serving in disguise).
These two characters: the heroic younger son who succeeded where his brother had failed; and the proud, genius of a father who had been cheated by his own need to help his people, were reduced in the movies to a whiny failure and a lunatic.
Changes like this, to which one can only say "wtf?" are why quite a few fans were annoyed by these movies, despite their stunning effects, cinematography, and casting.
PS Just to add one I haven't heard anywhere: would all directors making war movies PLEASE read at least ONE book at military tactics? Even my girlfriend was going "that is *so* not how you defend against a bunch of men in wooden boats" in the Osgiliath scene.
I went to see the movie with a few friends; one who had seen it, three who had not. All those who had not seen it were VERY confused about Denethor and agreed that his condition made much more sense after I explained the entirety of his story.
I mean, seriously, which is better: a randomly crazy king, or a proud, great man driven mad by a power he could not control? Jackson kept (in fact, extended) the Palantir scene at the beginning of the movie and then proceeded to drop it entirely. It was wasted screen time without showing Denethor's palantir as well. It completes both the minor story arc and gives his character motivation and purpose instead of random malice.
Even more, it reinforces Tolkien's major theme, indeed the theme of most Fantasy novels; the draw of a power so terrible, so seductive that it cannot be controlled by anyone. The ring, the palantir, all these ancient artifacts, used by Sauron, tempted the greatest minds and led them to their doom. It's a strong message about the absolute corruptability of power, and moreso than any little adventure of hobbits dropping a ring in a mountain, the purpose of the book.
An absolute necessity if you want to use off-the-shelf hardware (ie, ide cd-burners, $5 realtek ethernet cards, or "unsupported" wireless cards) on your mac. It's also my first stop if something going on with my system; they report almost any weird incompatibility anyone's ever had.
Would be one of the Lamp iMacs with a detacheable pressure-sensitive screen.
The first thought that went through my head when Steve introduced those things was that he was going to pop the screen off. Think about it; the biggest problem with tablets are managing to fit the processing power, hard drive, battery, ram, etc. into a thin enough shell that it feels like nothing more than a thin notebook you write on. I love my Tibook, but as light as it feels for a laptop, it's too generally unwieldy to be a comfortable writing tablet. I don't see you how could make anything more than a very underpowered, annoying laptop trying to fit everything into the screen and ignore all attempts at a keyboard. The point of a useful tablet is not to replace the functionality of a laptop; I can type twice as fast as I can write, and the form allows for a hard drive of useful size, a good video processor, etc. Where a tablet pc comes in handy is a replacement for a sketch pad, or for a system where you're only needing to point and click, like web browsing. These activities don't need good processors and large hard drives, and so current tablets lack both. The problem is that you must justify spending another thousand dollars, the cost of a separate computer, for just these little conveniences. A laptop and a wacom tablet are a much easier investment.
The solution? Leave the hard drive, the main processor, and the video memory where they belong; in the base of that little lamp. And when you want a full computer, leave the monitor in and you got it. But for those moments when you really feel like sitting on the couch and browsing the web (without, I may add, a Titanium oven burning through your pants), you just pop off the display and go sit down. Run everything over 802.11g and a custom version of x11; it's perfectly fast enough over a direct LAN connection for browsing the web. And suddenly, the tablet is not a neat-looking expensive extra, but a very, very cool extra feature of your main system. Tablets with current technology are too "niche" to be really useful or marketable. So don't separate them into their own niche; make the niche a part of an existing system. It's the only situation in which *I'd* ever consider one worth having, at least.
Does anyone else remember the revolutionary way to punish those who didn't remember to pay the registration fee?
The original Escape Velocity showed a pop-up at startup if you continued playing after the first thirty days (I installed it on a system whose system clock I had forgot to set, so I think my normal tally was about 1,564 days of use). However, it didn't block you out from any parts of the game or impose a time limit.
Instead, there was a unique NPC in a heavy fighter who in normal gameplay would always hail you with a "Don't forget to register" message. However, after the thirty day trial, the character, known as "Cap'n Hector" after a pet parrot in the ambrosia offices, would exact revenge on those who would steal the bird seed from her mouth. With cries of "Avast, ye scurvy software pirate," this nearly-invincible assassin would swoop down on your ship and assail you with a barrage of torpedoes and rockets.
Although at later stages of the game, this was a minor annoyance, in the starting shuttle one rocket blast was instant death. It was definitely the most amusing way to prevent full illegal use that I've ever seen.
(Although, to be honest, I finally defeated him with the use of a resource editor. Hector wasn't quite as threatening when she was buzzing around you in a weaponless shuttle:))
It was ported, but pretty much no one ever played it. Every mac FPS player had marathon. Doom was a quality game, but after playing marathon i just couldn't stand it after the first couple episodes. The gap was just too great.
I've used VP3 quite a bit, since DivX hasn't released a mac encoder yet. In my tests (recording on a Tibook G4 667) it encodes more slowly than Sorenson 3 or Apple's Mpeg4 codec, but the quality is very comparable, even better in high-motion scenes.
Mpeg4 and Sorenson 3, even at bit rates nearly half those of an Mpeg-2 DVD stream, still produce pixellation artifacts in very high-motion scenes. VP3, at any bitrate over 30Kps, does not. While it is not as sharp as the other codecs at high bit rates, I found it to be very superior at lower ones.
My only complaint is that, for some reason, any movie encoded at full size (640 by 480) would, not matter what the bitrate, barely play back at all. even though full 30 fps video plays back without difficulty on my G4. It wasn't a case of a few dropped frames, but a total stall down to 4 fps.
Anyway, for high-quality, low-bitrate video, it's the best codec I've had the opportunity to use personally in terms of quality and playback/ kbps. I'm sure that the newest DivX surpasses it, but I won't be able to play around with that codec until they release a mac encoder. VP3's quality is comparable to the DivX movies I have downloaded, though.
With some development, it could be a very competitive offering.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the same way it happens for Mac ports.
Game company A makes a windows game and sells a few million copise. Game publisher B sees this, pays company A to let them port the game and company C to do the actual porting.
The mac publisher (Like Aspyr, Macplay, or Destineer) has to pay for the game license, and for the porting company (Westlake, Omnigroup, or a few others) so that they can finally sell a few thousand copies of the game to mac users. In addition, of course, to paying royalties on the sales they DO make (in addition to the initial licensing fee) and support for the mac version.
Most ports require very little effort by the PC developers and publishers, but a LOT of effort and capital by the porting publisher themselves. This is why Loki went out of business. A hit with a 5% install base will give you just about enough money to pay for your next release. That's a really tough way to sustain development.
What Linux needs (and mac needs more of) are native, top-quality developers making mac and Linux first games. Ambrosia Software comes to mind on the mac; although they use a shareware business principal, their games are easily on the same level as most commercial offering. Bungie (of Halo fame/infamy) started out as the Mac's most popular/famous developer before they began first cross-developing with windows, and then being purchased by Microsoft for XBox development.
Companies like this are equivalent to exclusive releases to consoles. You have to have games that you can't get any other way.
What linux needs is developers making great linux games. Games that make windows gamers install linux just to play in the same way people buy an Xbox to play Halo.
I hope no one tells them about the Pacific. We could be in serious trouble.
They ARE doing some things like this, a good part of it is just focused on high school education.
l infirst/ --> my (the Ohio State University/ Dublin High Schools) team's site
I'm part of a team for the FIRST robotics competition. It's a national competition where engineers team up with high schoolers to build large-scale remote controlled robots to compete with each other. These things can get expensive, but it gives the high schoolers a chance to work with pretty complex machining and control systems.
Ford, GM, NASA, Delphi, Microsoft, and many other big technology companies sponsor teams. You end up with some really innovative designs for the weird games we get every yet, and the kids learn way more about engineering than they ever would otherwise.
The robots range from the cheap - like ours, at maybe two thousand for parts and built by college engineering students - to the incredibly expensive - Big corporate teams like Ford or Delphi have a team of professional engineers whose entire job for six weeks is to build an expensive, but fine-looking machine.
So, while I'd like to see some really high tech neat things come out of US companies, they are doing SOME things just for the coolness factor.
www.usfirst.org --> main website
http://techclasses.dublincoffman.com/dub
The problem isn't the idea of teaching computing at an early age, it's that of all the teachers in the school, maybe one understands more than how to check their email.
My mother teachers at a k-6 school in a low-income neighborhood. Their text books are ancient, but thanks to a state grant, every room has five top of the line computers (for 20 elementary students). I look at that and say, WONDERFUL. I would have LOVED to have that technology in class.
Then I look at how thick the dust is on them. The kids only use them during play time, or indoor recess to play educational games. The teachers use it for email.. maybe, half the time not even that. To many of them, the concept of double-clicking is as confusing as calculus would be to their students. The teachers don't use the computers to teach anything, especially not computing, and therefore they are a waste.
If schools want to invest money in computers, they should invest something into teacher training and make technology PART OF THE CURRICULUM. Teachers don't know computers because they don't care, and so they don't, won't, and can't teach them. They don't see technology, or in elementary, often even science, as important. And so.. the kids get $1500 game systems that they can use twice a day, and they learn how to click a mouse. Woohoo.
No offense, but being used by the popular kids is going to do nothing to help either of them.
The popular kid might respect him as intelligent, in the same way they respect a dictionary. But they won't care about him as a person. As for the smart kid, all he'll ever get out of that kind of group work is the knowledge that others will only slow him down.
The way to make group work useful for development is to make *him* dependent on his group, and not hating that fact. This only happens when his peers are as competent as he. Put him in a group that will actually take him farther than he would have gone on his own, and he'll learn something. Otherwise all he'll learn is how to get people to shut up and let him do his work.
All of the other possible cameos are completely impossible. There was a HUGE gap in time between The Hobbit and LotR, on the order of 70 years. That would have left Aragorn a young child, Arwen living in Lothlorien with her mother's people, and Barliman, the young hobbits, and possibly Gimli not even born.
Not to say that Jackson might not do it anyway, but it just wouldn't make sense if he did.
I go to Ohio State University, and for the past week I and most people I have know have been receiving these message from
staff@osu.edu.
That's over 30,000 users, right there, on broadband. Multiply that by every campus in the world... I was honestly even curious about it, until I saw the attachment file. Their biggest weakness in it, actually, was that it sent several copies, each with a different user@osu.edu. That made it more suspicious.
are eclipsed or lessened by working in a mostly PC environment?
.doc files because I'm on a mac, I can't open .doc files because I MS Office is expensive and I don't like the interface. I don't use it on my PC either; if people just figured out to send files in a free format, I wouldn't have a problem on either system.
Mac OS hasn't cared whether I name my picture fluffy_bunny.jpg or "I saw the cutest bunny the other day!!!" for the over ten years I've been using it, but I still remember to stick file extensions after everything I make because I *know* at some point I'm going to have to send it to a windows user.
Setting up a small appletalk network involves two things: plugging in a cable (to the auto-configuring ethernet port that doesn't require crossover cables for direct connections that every mac has had for the last five years and I still can't find on a PC), and flipping two checkboxes: "Turn appletalk on" and "Turn file sharing on." Yet if I want to transfer files or play a networked game, I still need to setup an ad hoc TCP/IP network and figure out how to set up a workgroup on my friend's system: I've honestly managed to setup windows file sharing on my mac twice as fast as I could on my windows box.
And I can't open
I have hours of examples of favorite mac features that I almost never get to use because no one else I know uses a mac. Almost all reasons to use windows, from initial price to software availability, stem from the same source; everyone else has it, and you're going to have to deal with everyone else at some point.
Anything that requires high bandwidth will not like working on the hub. USB was not designed for high data rate transfers and divides bandwidth *equally* among all devices. That's right, if you have your DJ and your mouse plugged into USB 2.0 to transfer, they both get equal bandwidth. That's why a lot of devices dislike hubs. No idea if this is the case on the Rio, though. And as for 6 USB ports, the whole point of the damn interface is that you wouldn't need that many ports. Also, it's 6 USB if you get the case with the front port and take up one of your PCI slots with an adapter. Sure, the motherboard SUPPORTS 6 ports, but I've never had any reason to take up space with all of them. The whole point of USB was hot-pluggable chainable (or hubbable, however you want to say that) external device management for low bandwidth devices. The fact that new motherboards have to come with 6 ports to make it useful for most things is a testament to the stupidity of trying to expand this standard to high-speed devices. If I want high speed, I want IEEE1394. Period.
I don't think any fan honestly complains about these movies for what they left out. I mean, sure, we'd like to see the scouring of the shire, and Bombadil and whatnot, but it's a movie, and it's really freaking long already.
What ticks off fans of the books is when their favorite characters or moments are mauled just to make the movie different. Faramir was, in the books, Aragorn's near-equal, a good man living in the shadow of his supposedly greater brother, but who turned out to be the best in the end. Denethor was similar, in the Appendices he was described as one of the greatest captains of Gonder in ages, and his exploits would have been legendary had they not been second to another captain of Gonder (Aragorn, then serving in disguise).
These two characters: the heroic younger son who succeeded where his brother had failed; and the proud, genius of a father who had been cheated by his own need to help his people, were reduced in the movies to a whiny failure and a lunatic.
Changes like this, to which one can only say "wtf?" are why quite a few fans were annoyed by these movies, despite their stunning effects, cinematography, and casting.
PS Just to add one I haven't heard anywhere: would all directors making war movies PLEASE read at least ONE book at military tactics? Even my girlfriend was going "that is *so* not how you defend against a bunch of men in wooden boats" in the Osgiliath scene.
My girlfriend's system was so fubared that Ctrl-Alt-Delete brought up "The program failed to run." What do you do when the Task Manager crashes?
Needless to say, that box now runs Gentoo.
I went to see the movie with a few friends; one who had seen it, three who had not. All those who had not seen it were VERY confused about Denethor and agreed that his condition made much more sense after I explained the entirety of his story.
I mean, seriously, which is better: a randomly crazy king, or a proud, great man driven mad by a power he could not control? Jackson kept (in fact, extended) the Palantir scene at the beginning of the movie and then proceeded to drop it entirely. It was wasted screen time without showing Denethor's palantir as well. It completes both the minor story arc and gives his character motivation and purpose instead of random malice.
Even more, it reinforces Tolkien's major theme, indeed the theme of most Fantasy novels; the draw of a power so terrible, so seductive that it cannot be controlled by anyone. The ring, the palantir, all these ancient artifacts, used by Sauron, tempted the greatest minds and led them to their doom. It's a strong message about the absolute corruptability of power, and moreso than any little adventure of hobbits dropping a ring in a mountain, the purpose of the book.
You completely forgot xlr8yourmac.com.
An absolute necessity if you want to use off-the-shelf hardware (ie, ide cd-burners, $5 realtek ethernet cards, or "unsupported" wireless cards) on your mac. It's also my first stop if something going on with my system; they report almost any weird incompatibility anyone's ever had.
Would be one of the Lamp iMacs with a detacheable pressure-sensitive screen.
The first thought that went through my head when Steve introduced those things was that he was going to pop the screen off. Think about it; the biggest problem with tablets are managing to fit the processing power, hard drive, battery, ram, etc. into a thin enough shell that it feels like nothing more than a thin notebook you write on. I love my Tibook, but as light as it feels for a laptop, it's too generally unwieldy to be a comfortable writing tablet. I don't see you how could make anything more than a very underpowered, annoying laptop trying to fit everything into the screen and ignore all attempts at a keyboard. The point of a useful tablet is not to replace the functionality of a laptop; I can type twice as fast as I can write, and the form allows for a hard drive of useful size, a good video processor, etc. Where a tablet pc comes in handy is a replacement for a sketch pad, or for a system where you're only needing to point and click, like web browsing. These activities don't need good processors and large hard drives, and so current tablets lack both. The problem is that you must justify spending another thousand dollars, the cost of a separate computer, for just these little conveniences. A laptop and a wacom tablet are a much easier investment.
The solution? Leave the hard drive, the main processor, and the video memory where they belong; in the base of that little lamp. And when you want a full computer, leave the monitor in and you got it. But for those moments when you really feel like sitting on the couch and browsing the web (without, I may add, a Titanium oven burning through your pants), you just pop off the display and go sit down. Run everything over 802.11g and a custom version of x11; it's perfectly fast enough over a direct LAN connection for browsing the web. And suddenly, the tablet is not a neat-looking expensive extra, but a very, very cool extra feature of your main system. Tablets with current technology are too "niche" to be really useful or marketable. So don't separate them into their own niche; make the niche a part of an existing system. It's the only situation in which *I'd* ever consider one worth having, at least.
I should really remember to change the formatting options so there are, you know, paragraphs :(
Does anyone else remember the revolutionary way to punish those who didn't remember to pay the registration fee? The original Escape Velocity showed a pop-up at startup if you continued playing after the first thirty days (I installed it on a system whose system clock I had forgot to set, so I think my normal tally was about 1,564 days of use). However, it didn't block you out from any parts of the game or impose a time limit. Instead, there was a unique NPC in a heavy fighter who in normal gameplay would always hail you with a "Don't forget to register" message. However, after the thirty day trial, the character, known as "Cap'n Hector" after a pet parrot in the ambrosia offices, would exact revenge on those who would steal the bird seed from her mouth. With cries of "Avast, ye scurvy software pirate," this nearly-invincible assassin would swoop down on your ship and assail you with a barrage of torpedoes and rockets. Although at later stages of the game, this was a minor annoyance, in the starting shuttle one rocket blast was instant death. It was definitely the most amusing way to prevent full illegal use that I've ever seen. (Although, to be honest, I finally defeated him with the use of a resource editor. Hector wasn't quite as threatening when she was buzzing around you in a weaponless shuttle :))
It was ported, but pretty much no one ever played it. Every mac FPS player had marathon. Doom was a quality game, but after playing marathon i just couldn't stand it after the first couple episodes. The gap was just too great.
I've used VP3 quite a bit, since DivX hasn't released a mac encoder yet. In my tests (recording on a Tibook G4 667) it encodes more slowly than Sorenson 3 or Apple's Mpeg4 codec, but the quality is very comparable, even better in high-motion scenes.
Mpeg4 and Sorenson 3, even at bit rates nearly half those of an Mpeg-2 DVD stream, still produce pixellation artifacts in very high-motion scenes. VP3, at any bitrate over 30Kps, does not. While it is not as sharp as the other codecs at high bit rates, I found it to be very superior at lower ones.
My only complaint is that, for some reason, any movie encoded at full size (640 by 480) would, not matter what the bitrate, barely play back at all. even though full 30 fps video plays back without difficulty on my G4. It wasn't a case of a few dropped frames, but a total stall down to 4 fps.
Anyway, for high-quality, low-bitrate video, it's the best codec I've had the opportunity to use personally in terms of quality and playback/ kbps. I'm sure that the newest DivX surpasses it, but I won't be able to play around with that codec until they release a mac encoder. VP3's quality is comparable to the DivX movies I have downloaded, though.
With some development, it could be a very competitive offering.