I'm posting this from the crapper, actually. In fact, I have a very nice setup because there's a small chair thing that I put my PowerBook on, and it means I actually have a very comfortable position. Those things do get extremely hot, so actually using it on my bare thighs is not an option.
OSX runs all classic MacOS software, runs Carbon/Cocoa-based apps, and can also compile most unix apps, including X-windows packages (I have XFree running in OSX, for instance, and run Apache/PHP/PostGreSQL/sshd on the same box.
What about A Life Less Ordinary (1997), which just happened to star Ewan McGregor, Holly Hunter and Cameron Diaz. Boyle directed.
I even bought the same pair of Airwalks that McGregor used in the movie, probably because all the advertising affected me so much. Or maybe it was coincidence. Still have them, though.
Charles was notoriously narrow-minded. He truly despised MPEG2-support (that's why there isn't any in the QT client) and in general was quite disliked as such.
I should correct myself. Charles used to say that MPEG-2 was a delivery-only medium. Hence, nobody would ever want to edit in it.
Ofcourse there are countless MPEG-2 editing systems, as well as the professional Beta SX format. Visionary.
So? QuickTime steals them in the first place; the difference is, with QuickTime, you can't get your associations back, as there buried inside of IE. I can't right click and save a PNG file on my own computer! And at least media player doesn't flash me with an advertisement every time I use it.
Absolutely a crock.
Open a movie in your browser. Click on the small arrow in the right corner. Plugin settings... Remove/Add extensions as you wish.
Let Apple know that the Linux community will support them by BUYING the commercial version of the player if it's available, as that is their main benefit in doing the port
There was a pretty nasty discussion on the Apple QuickTime-talk mailing list last autumn about this exact point, and I can give you quotes from Charles Wiltgen, who used to be the main QT evangelist for Apple over many years, but who left quite recently to go elsewhere. In fact, the thread we were writing was forced shut by Charles, and deemed as off-topic. The discussion can be read here, here and here. These are Apple's daily digests of the list. The primary reasons for Apple not having made a cross-platform (why limit it to Linux?) are as follows:
Vendor licencing Apple wants the vendors to sponsor development of the player to their platform. In the Linux case, this was quite clear. "Red hat is one Linux vendors who just had a very successfull IPO, and there are a few other Linux vendors with plans to do the same." (sic)
I asked for cost estimates. No response.
When mentioning that Apple indeed ported the QT client to the MS Windows platform, the obvious response is that they went from a 7% or so market share to a 95% market share.
Market Share Apple are not interested in spending millions of dollars (their estimate) on porting the QT Client to Linux because of market share. How many percent more users would they receive by doing this? The amount is negligable. However, I think they shouldn't concentrate on a Linux port alone, but rather a true Cross-platform port. If complex systems like Oracle can be ported to Linux (closed source, even! No need to open that up!) then why not the QT client?
I tried to make it clear to them that their precious market share is exactly why they should invest in spreading the client to as many platforms as possible. He who owns the player, owns the market, right? To this, the general response is that "the future of QT is MacOS X and Altivec".
Ofcourse, if they have the QT client natively on MacOS X, then obviously they should be able to port it to whatever, right?
I tried pointing to SGI's at the time interest in Linux over NT. I tried pointing to various other clients which are available cross platform (Acrobat, Flash, etc) and that have become de-facto standards as a result of increasing accesibility of their clients.
No luck. Linux, and most other Unix flavours are used as servers 99% of the time. For them, the streaming server is perfect. "QuickTime is on every mainstream OS right now, which is what our customers (consumers, content developers, software developers) want."
MacOS X and Altivec After a while, the list got blocked from Linux/cross-platform discussions, and there was a private mail-discussion about the topic. Charles wrote "It's actually getting really boring, not to mention off-topic. Apple's future is Mac OS X and Altivec, period. Naturally this is Quicktime's future as well."
Charles was notoriously narrow-minded. He truly despised MPEG2-support (that's why there isn't any in the QT client) and in general was quite disliked as such.
Hopefully this time such a petition can get through. But don't count on it.
the amount of trouble I've had with Register.com in the last 3-4 days has made me appreciate how easy it is do do things through NetSol.
I'll second that. Trying to register many different domains, under the same register.com login, for a client turned out to be hell when the client wished to gain control over his own domains.
Basically they don't allow you to move a domain to even another user at register.com, and this really ticks me off.
Also, their e-mails are less than informative about which domains you are changing information about. They just say that you are about to change this domain, and never care to specify which one.
And yes, I have mentioned this to their less-than-helpful-but-swift support service. They'll try to implement the changes "one day".
The QT4Linux libraries are development libraries, and do not posess hardly any of the features of the QT player as developed by Apple. And certainly, the most interesting codecs (Sorenson, Qdesign) are not included.
Although the libraries are great, and we're using them for a M-JPEG project right now, they're not to be confused by the player proper, so please don't pretend that they are.
This falls squarely in the "rumor" catagory, but at NAB99 about a truly "crossplatform" version of QuickTime, and he very carefully worded it as "we would NOT see a Linux version of QuickTime before the OS X Consumer version was out".
I made a shitload of noise on the Quicktime-talk mailing lists about a truly cross-platform version of QuickTime (the player and codec modules). I don't care too much about a Linux version, but I want the QuickTime format (which is wonderful) to get a wider spread than it has, particularly on un*x machines.
The first comments were basically "Have your vendor licence it from Apple." and "Won't it be great for that vendor to be the one offering QT?" Comments about the Windows client (not licenced by Microsoft) petered out to market share talk, which makes sense, although it's ever so unfair. Apple would not make the big money from a vendor licence, but rather from owning the major format for digital media. They don't seem to understand this.
OK, this costs a lot of money, and ofcourse was not the kind of answer I was hoping for -- in my eyes Apple would be the one to benefit from spreading their technology. This was from Charles Wiltgen, who is the QT Technology manager at Apple. Feel free to write him, but don't expect much understanding.
I don't see Red Hat and SuSE funding some GPL'd alternative (which without compatible codecs is moot anyhow)
This is exactly what Wiltgen meant by a vendor licencing it, and he hinted that RedHat had just completed a very successfull IPO. Should we leave it up to one of them to do this?
Wiltgen has, however, promised me that they will revisit the case of a true cross-platform QT player. We can only wait, I guess.
The MP4 file format is designed to contain the media information of an MPEG-4 presentation in a flexible, extensible format that facilitates interchange, management, editing, and presentation of the media. This presentation may be 'local' to the system containing the presentation, or may be via a network or other stream delivery mechanism (a TransMux). The file format is designed to be independent of any particular TransMux while enabling efficient support for TransMuxes in general. The design is based on the QuickTime® format from Apple Computer Inc.
Actually I think it is because they use a secure server to register domains. Remember how lynx doesn't support https?
Alert!: This client does not contain support for HTTPS URLs.
I spidered the first page of www.register.com port. It reads well with lynx, so it must be some other reason. Why don't you write to them and complain?
Did you ever try to write to NIS and hope for a response that wasn't totally stupid or ignorant?
>Does anyone know of ANY video hardware supported >under Linux that supports any sort of medium to >high bitrate video codecs? Any hardware that can >do MPEG2? Or software?
I'm quite interested in the Tivo boxes, but more from the hardware point of view.
We're developing a centralised media recording-centre for recording multiple channels of TV and radio onto a large server. So far we've been thinking MJPEG with the Linux Media Labs card, which runs only on Linux. But still we would have to build our own TV-tuner set.
Hopefully some of the technology that the Tivo guys are using can become accessible for the rest of us as well. If I have some luck, this could happen, and it would be so perfect.
Surely that's not your ordinary D-GPS (code based)? Sounds more like phase-assisted, kinematic D-GPS. In static mode, the best (non-phase) DGPS I've seen does +-80 cm. With phase and on-the-fly ambiguity resolution, even +-1..2cm is possible, but only over baselines 20 km.
Not that I am an expert on it, I have seen D-GPS in use for measuring the subsidence of oil platforms in the North Seas. Over a period of months you get within accuracies of millimeters.
This is not exactly practical for in-car use, however. Heh.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm posting this from the crapper, actually. In fact, I have a very nice setup because there's a small chair thing that I put my PowerBook on, and it means I actually have a very comfortable position. Those things do get extremely hot, so actually using it on my bare thighs is not an option.
--rune
Of course, it never crossed your mind to report these things as bugs, either, right?
Limited number of programs?
OSX runs all classic MacOS software, runs Carbon/Cocoa-based apps, and can also compile most unix apps, including X-windows packages (I have XFree running in OSX, for instance, and run Apache/PHP/PostGreSQL/sshd on the same box.
That's hardly a limited number of programs.
I even bought the same pair of Airwalks that McGregor used in the movie, probably because all the advertising affected me so much. Or maybe it was coincidence. Still have them, though.
I should correct myself. Charles used to say that MPEG-2 was a delivery-only medium. Hence, nobody would ever want to edit in it.
Ofcourse there are countless MPEG-2 editing systems, as well as the professional Beta SX format. Visionary.
Absolutely a crock.
Open a movie in your browser. Click on the small arrow in the right corner. Plugin settings... Remove/Add extensions as you wish.
There was a pretty nasty discussion on the Apple QuickTime-talk mailing list last autumn about this exact point, and I can give you quotes from Charles Wiltgen, who used to be the main QT evangelist for Apple over many years, but who left quite recently to go elsewhere. In fact, the thread we were writing was forced shut by Charles, and deemed as off-topic. The discussion can be read here, here and here. These are Apple's daily digests of the list. The primary reasons for Apple not having made a cross-platform (why limit it to Linux?) are as follows:
Vendor licencing
Apple wants the vendors to sponsor development of the player to their platform. In the Linux case, this was quite clear. "Red hat is one Linux vendors who just had a very successfull IPO, and there are a few other Linux vendors with plans to do the same." (sic)
I asked for cost estimates. No response.
When mentioning that Apple indeed ported the QT client to the MS Windows platform, the obvious response is that they went from a 7% or so market share to a 95% market share.
Market Share
Apple are not interested in spending millions of dollars (their estimate) on porting the QT Client to Linux because of market share. How many percent more users would they receive by doing this? The amount is negligable. However, I think they shouldn't concentrate on a Linux port alone, but rather a true Cross-platform port. If complex systems like Oracle can be ported to Linux (closed source, even! No need to open that up!) then why not the QT client?
I tried to make it clear to them that their precious market share is exactly why they should invest in spreading the client to as many platforms as possible. He who owns the player, owns the market, right? To this, the general response is that "the future of QT is MacOS X and Altivec".
Ofcourse, if they have the QT client natively on MacOS X, then obviously they should be able to port it to whatever, right?
I tried pointing to SGI's at the time interest in Linux over NT. I tried pointing to various other clients which are available cross platform (Acrobat, Flash, etc) and that have become de-facto standards as a result of increasing accesibility of their clients.
No luck. Linux, and most other Unix flavours are used as servers 99% of the time. For them, the streaming server is perfect. "QuickTime is on every mainstream OS right now, which is what our customers (consumers, content developers, software developers) want."
MacOS X and Altivec
After a while, the list got blocked from Linux/cross-platform discussions, and there was a private mail-discussion about the topic. Charles wrote "It's actually getting really boring, not to mention off-topic. Apple's future is Mac OS X and Altivec, period. Naturally this is Quicktime's future as well."
Charles was notoriously narrow-minded. He truly despised MPEG2-support (that's why there isn't any in the QT client) and in general was quite disliked as such.
Hopefully this time such a petition can get through. But don't count on it.
Last time I used a 15" CRT was about 4 years ago. Even a 17" display seems small these days.
Although I don't see how this is relevant when this machine is targeted towards a very specific market segment, I'll still make a small comment.
How about the Cinema Display Apple makes? 22 inches diagonal widescreen, with the display space of a 24 inch CRT?
Don't compare things that shouldn't be. It makes little sense.
I'll second that. Trying to register many different domains, under the same register.com login, for a client turned out to be hell when the client wished to gain control over his own domains.
Basically they don't allow you to move a domain to even another user at register.com, and this really ticks me off.
Also, their e-mails are less than informative about which domains you are changing information about. They just say that you are about to change this domain, and never care to specify which one.
And yes, I have mentioned this to their less-than-helpful-but-swift support service. They'll try to implement the changes "one day".
I got your QuickTime for Linux right here
No you haven't.
The QT4Linux libraries are development libraries, and do not posess hardly any of the features of the QT player as developed by Apple. And certainly, the most interesting codecs (Sorenson, Qdesign) are not included.
Although the libraries are great, and we're using them for a M-JPEG project right now, they're not to be confused by the player proper, so please don't pretend that they are.
This falls squarely in the "rumor" catagory, but at NAB99 about a truly "crossplatform" version of QuickTime, and he very carefully worded it as "we would NOT see a Linux version of QuickTime before the OS X Consumer version was out".
I made a shitload of noise on the Quicktime-talk mailing lists about a truly cross-platform version of QuickTime (the player and codec modules). I don't care too much about a Linux version, but I want the QuickTime format (which is wonderful) to get a wider spread than it has, particularly on un*x machines.
The first comments were basically "Have your vendor licence it from Apple." and "Won't it be great for that vendor to be the one offering QT?" Comments about the Windows client (not licenced by Microsoft) petered out to market share talk, which makes sense, although it's ever so unfair. Apple would not make the big money from a vendor licence, but rather from owning the major format for digital media. They don't seem to understand this.
OK, this costs a lot of money, and ofcourse was not the kind of answer I was hoping for -- in my eyes Apple would be the one to benefit from spreading their technology. This was from Charles Wiltgen, who is the QT Technology manager at Apple. Feel free to write him, but don't expect much understanding.
I don't see Red Hat and SuSE funding some GPL'd alternative (which without compatible codecs is moot anyhow)
This is exactly what Wiltgen meant by a vendor licencing it, and he hinted that RedHat had just completed a very successfull IPO. Should we leave it up to one of them to do this?
Wiltgen has, however, promised me that they will revisit the case of a true cross-platform QT player. We can only wait, I guess.
The answer would obviously be:
A/S/L?
By the way: a lot of the very clever stuff within Quicktime 4 has lead it to become chosen as the basis for the transport system of MPEG-4.
This is from the Overview of the Mpeg-4 standard document:
6.1.3 MPEG-4 File Format
The MP4 file format is designed to contain the media information of an MPEG-4 presentation in a flexible, extensible format that facilitates interchange, management, editing, and presentation of the media. This presentation may be 'local' to the system containing the presentation, or may be via a network or other stream delivery mechanism (a TransMux). The file format is designed to be independent of any particular TransMux while enabling efficient support for TransMuxes in general. The design is based on the QuickTime® format from Apple Computer Inc.
This is lightyears ahead??
Actually I think it is because they use a secure server to register domains. Remember how lynx doesn't support https?
Alert!: This client does not contain support for HTTPS URLs.
I spidered the first page of www.register.com port. It reads well with lynx, so it must be some other reason. Why don't you write to them and complain?
Did you ever try to write to NIS and hope for a response that wasn't totally stupid or ignorant?
Strong points of register.com:
Negative aspects:
All in all it's lightyears ahead of NIS, and I'm quite happy.
>Does anyone know of ANY video hardware supported
>under Linux that supports any sort of medium to
>high bitrate video codecs? Any hardware that can
>do MPEG2? Or software?
I'm quite interested in the Tivo boxes, but more from the hardware point of view.
We're developing a centralised media recording-centre for recording multiple channels of TV and radio onto a large server. So far we've been thinking MJPEG with the Linux Media Labs card, which runs only on Linux. But still we would have to build our own TV-tuner set.
Hopefully some of the technology that the Tivo guys are using can become accessible for the rest of us as well. If I have some luck, this could happen, and it would be so perfect.
Wired News reports that the lawsuit was rejected by the courts.
Maybe common sense is coming over your country's judicial system?
Surely that's not your ordinary D-GPS (code based)? Sounds more like phase-assisted, kinematic D-GPS. In static mode, the best (non-phase) DGPS I've seen does +-80 cm. With phase and on-the-fly ambiguity resolution, even +-1..2cm is possible, but only over baselines 20 km.
Not that I am an expert on it, I have seen D-GPS in use for measuring the subsidence of oil platforms in the North Seas. Over a period of months you get within accuracies of millimeters.
This is not exactly practical for in-car use, however. Heh.