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Apple Businesses

Quicktime 5 vs. Everybody? 34

Posted by Cliff from the but-it's-still-not-cross-paltform-enough dept.
Dean Siren asks: "Now that Apple has released the Quicktime 5 Public Preview, they've upgraded their video codec to Sorenson 3 from Sorenson 2 which Jeremy Neish says pales in comparison to MPEG4 and its derivatives. So, how well does Sorenson 3 compete against MPEG4 as far as quality per bitrate, processor demand, compression times, and streaming are concerned? Can Apple now stay ahead of DivX, Windows Media Player 7 and Real Player 8?" Neish notes that none of the latest codecs are not compatible with Unix so only Mac and Windows users get to take advantage of the latest in digital video formats. When someone gets around to fixing this, then I can again get excited about Quicktime, until then it's just another format to me (and yet another reason why I have to have a Windows box lying around).
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Quicktime 5 vs. Everybody? More

Quicktime 5 vs. Everybody?

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  • quicktime will do mpeg4 (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @02:10PM (#713871)
    quicktime is an *architecture* far more complex than just codecs and audio and video apple is very active in mpeg4 development even if apple can't get it out the door for a while, there are plenty of 3rd parties that can do a codec that will plug in - with the new autodownloading components in qt5, this makes installing third party components (skins, codecs, etc) automatic, secure, and painless. there will be linux someday - not this year probably next (understandably, osx is steve's primary new os porting target right now - after that, they will do linux - it's just a matter of time and priority)
  • "None of the latest formats are not compatible with UNIX so..."

    Sorry, I didn't catch that, is it "None of the latest formats are compatible," or "The latest formats are not compatible," or is it REALLY supposed to be "None of the latest formats are not compatible with UNIX?"

    See, that would come as a surprise to me since MS's format sure as hell isn't UNIX friendly, Real's new format sure as hell isn't UNIX friendly (unless I missed something), and the only one that is (somewhat) is DivX :-).
  • That sounds _great_ to me. Has anybody at Apple said anything to that extent? Even off-handedly? I don't mean to tear down your statement, but I would like to hear someone at Apple say something about porting Quicktime to Linux, even if it's not going to be here for another year.
  • Not using double negatives will be disallowed.

  • Re:None of... not... huh? (Score:3)

    by SEWilco ( 27983 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @03:37PM (#713875) Journal
    Gee, why quibble about minor spelling and grammatical errors? It's the intent that is important, not the arrangement of letters. Just read what was typed and let it wash over you, absorbing what the author meant and felt without worrying about the delivery. What's important is that the author meant well and put so much effort into trying to express himself.

    Incidentally, I have this 800-page short story that I'd like your opinion on...

  • I hate to keep harping on this... (Score:4)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @04:19PM (#713876) Homepage Journal
    (actually, I obviously love to keep harping on this, or I wouldn't.)

    Apple is not now, nor have they ever been, a friend of the open source movement. Were they a friend, they would at least release a binary only, closed source version of Quicktime for Linux. Better still, a binary-only plug-in for Xanim. Best, they would release the Sorenson decoder source (the real magic of these things is not in the decoder, but in the ENCODER: figuring out what data to eliminate is the hard work, reconstructing it is relatively easy.)

    What has Apple done for the open source or free software movements? They've released yet another kernel for PPC. Nice, but we already have several OSS and free software kernels out there.

    The next time Apple tries to milk the movements for free publicity, stand up and call them on it.
  • ... you can play DivX;) on a linux box. IA32 only, but hey. It's called "Avifile" and "Xtheater". Go check it out, it rocks the house...

    Xtheater.sourceforge.net

    -----
  • I am under the impression that Apple can't release source to their Sorenson codec. I think they license it from somewhere.

    Which of course begs the question, if it isn't as good as MPEG4, then why don't they add MPEG4?

  • Re:Apple's Sorenson codec (Score:3)

    by /dev/kev ( 9760 ) on Wednesday October 11, 2000 @06:01PM (#713879) Homepage
    Apple have an exclusive license from Sorenson to use the codec. This means that when you ask Sorenson about it, they say "Sorry, we'd love to sell (not give) you a license, but our hands are tied - Apple have an exclusive license. Go bug them about it."

    While I don't know the exact details of the license, I'm pretty sure it prevents Apple from releasing any source. Even if it doesn't prevent them, Apple have made it quite clear that they have no intentions of ever releasing the source. The license almost certainly forbids Apple from relicensing the technology, so it's unlikely they could allow any third-party (such as the Xanim author) to develop an implementation of the codec.

    Hell, they're not even interested in a totally non-free binary-only port. There's definately nothing (legally) stopping them from doing this, it'd just be another platform which QT5 supports in addition to the usual suspects. It'd make good business sense, too, since Apple are (essentially) fighting a codec war with MPEG4 and RealVideo, and having the free software movement on their side would help them immeasurably. Instead, people using free software platforms can't even view Sorenson encoded stuff, which means they'll just pass it over as an option.
  • Apple almost never makes public statements about future products until they are soon to be released, OS X being the exception as they've made many, many announcements about it over the years. That aside, I do think a port of Quicktime to Linux is quite likely, however, they're probably not focusing on it, and when they do decide to focus on it they'll have to hire new people or re-educate old ones. Unless of course they use WINE to create a port of the Windows version. Given that WINE is unable at present to run the current version of Quicktime it seems unlikely to be a choice for Apple, given the development work to port the Windows version will likely be as much work as creating a new client from scratch (which would be better since they could release the player as source-code, although the codecs would have to be binary).

  • Given that MPEG4 isn't finalized as a standard, there's really no reason for Apple to release it. Since the Quicktime framework allows for Apple to easily add new codecs to it (and MPEG4 uses Quicktime as a model) it will be possible (and very likely) that when the standard is finalized, Quicktime will support it.

    Quicktime on Mac already handles MPEG1, MPEG2 support is included in QT 5. If it offers significant improvements over the Sorenson Codecs MPEG4 could be used as the encoding instead of Sorenson and made usable on all platforms that QT is supported on (QT5 might run on Linux by the time the standard is finalized).

  • In my experience, LAMP works better than Xtheater 0.5.2. Haven't tried the latest Xtheater release, though.
  • Just a personal opinion, but I have my reasons. I'm still running a K6-200 (with 64 megs), and Quicktime under Win95 is practically unusable. The player takes inordinately long to load, and all but the lowest resolutions are extremely choppy.

    Quicktime was ahead of it's time, and normally I'd give it the benefit of the doubt and just say it's time I bought a new system. What's unacceptable, however, is the fact that MediaPlayer plays Quicktime files (the ones it can play at all) with better quality and half the overhead of the Quicktime player. There's just no excuse for that sort of bloat (and we're comparing it to a Microsoft product here).
  • I have to agree....
    I run QT4 on a K6-400 w/64MB & it's painful. Choppy, the audio goes out of sync almost immediately & pixelated to hell.

    Interestingly, QT4 on a PowerMac 8500/150 (roughly equivalent to a Pentium 1 160) with 56MB runs about the same.
    QT5 preview on the same Mac boots slower, but runs around 2x faster - I could watch the 640x480 Charlie's Angels trailer quite happily ;)

    Don't ask me why an outmoded Mac works better than a PC - I guess Apple don't care much.


    Keeper of the Wedding Shenanigans Home Page

  • You have it dead right. I've written to both Apple and Sorenson asking them to do something about this, and they play a fine old game of "pass the potato"

    Sorenson: Sorry, we cannot do anything about this, Apple has an exclusive license, talk to them.

    Apple: Sorry, it's Sorenson's codec, talk to them.

    As I said, Apple is not a friend of Open Source/Free Software.

  • Neish notes that none of the latest codecs are not compatible with Unix so only Mac and Windows users get to take advantage of the latest in digital video formats.

    Regardless of the grammatical correctness discussed elsewhere, I'm curious as to how a codec can be incompatible with Unix. Not currently implemented for Unix, yes, but incompatible, no. It's just a stream of bytes at the end of the day -- and that's *very* compatible with Unix.

  • If there's an 'I Hate Quicktime' post, consider me in on it. Using it on my PentiumPro 200 with 96 megs on Win98SE (or Win95) is almost unbearable. Slow to launch, slow to run, choppy, etc. The DivX [mydivx.com] codec running under the standard Windows Media Player (not v 7) performs much better. Then again, Quicktime has pretty much always sucked under windows.

    --
  • One thing I think everyone is forgetting. Remember that QT is mainly a format developed by Apple. It is (currently) the dominant format for media on the web. QT Streaming has replaced RealVideo on many sites for example. The only real competition is Windows Media Player and the .asf format (whcih is mostly used for p0rn anyway so I don't care).

    my point however is that QT also works fully on Mac OS X (I know I work with it) which is based on BSD and the Mach kernel. With the libraries available and working, I really think (and hope) that they will work with Linux some day. The format doesn't even need to be published as long as the libs are around. you make QT do all the work of loading movies and playing them. An app just needs to make calls to the library and it just works.

    I speak as someone who does some development with QT on the Mac (as well as tyring to get a Linux project going). Here's hoping!

  • You have one foot in the water.

    By that I mean you are missing alot of what OS X is. While it is true that it is based on BSD, it also has the Carbon and cocoa layers. The GUI portion would probably never be ported to Linux, but that is no big deal. The codec itself is actually a Sorenson codec, which you need a license for and apple is not letting this go. If they are not letting the codec out for QT4 wwhy would they let it out for QT5.

    Under Linux you have xanim . If you go to his web site (here -> http://xanim.va.pubnix.com/) you'll see that he tried to get the codec, but they would not give it to him. What we in the Linux connumut and the UNIX community need to do is probably set up a petition to petition either the US gov (cause that is where M$ and Apple are) to open their codecs to other platforms. This is sort of a monopolistic tactic. It is currently blocking out anny and every *NIX user from watching these movies, and requiring that if they want to they own either a windows box or mac box.

    Personally I am looking forward to the day when emulators are free (like dosemu) and easy to install and available for Mac. Then I only need to own one box, but can emulate the other OSes. I think that the freemware project or plex86 as I think it is called now will be a big help in this department, but it may take them a year or two to get anything worth using. I'm gonna try bochs soon though.

    I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
    Flame away, I have a hose!

  • I don't have anywhere near that trouble with QT4 under Windows, and that's running it on a Pentium 133 with 48MB's of RAM under Win98. I have more trouble with Real Player than QT. .5fps video under RP, can easily do 20fps under QT.

    However, the interface uses too many bloated DirectX API's causing it to be much slower than it should be. If Apple had stayed with the older interface it would have run much more smoothly, instead they added a lot more overhead which made things slower than before. The speed improvements made for 4.1 scarcely reduce the speed problems they created.
  • I'm not missing anything of what OS X is. I know the codec is not out for Linux. I know xanim couldn't get the codec. That is NOT the issue I'm trying to point out.

    What I AM pointing out is QT runs on the BSD shell. I don't think it would take much for Apple to make the libraries work under Linux or any other *nix. The codec is embedded in the libs. All apps (includeing xanim) have to do at that point is make calls to the library and let the lib handle everything. Then QT movies should work on Linux.

    Now, whether Apple will do the legwork to port the libs, is another issue entirely. All I'm saying is it can be done, and hope it will.

  • I think he meant "None of the latest formats are not incompatible with UNIX"
  • I don't think it would be that easy; the graphics and sound APIs in Linux are totally different from the ones in OS X. Since QuickTime mostly deals with graphics and sound, you're looking at some serious rewriting.
  • Because last I heard, QuickTime was the starting point for MPEG4. Check it out:

    http: //w ww.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1998/q2/980211 .pr.rel.iso.html [apple.com]

    And...

    http://www.cselt.it/ mpe g/standards/mpeg-4/mpeg-4.htm#E11E10 [cselt.it]

    ----
  • > Apple is not now, nor have they ever been, a friend of the open source movement.

    What about all the source from Darwin they've given back to the community, despite no obligation whatsoever to?

    Apple doesn't give away competitive advantages. That means they're a business run for the benefit of shareholders. Well, DUH.

    Back under the bridge, troll.
  • Hell, they're not even interested in a totally non-free binary-only port.

    Sure they are. They just don't see that the benefits match the costs.

    The equation will balance a bit more once the OS X port is finished, but with no demand from the authoring side and just a couple million non-revenue-producing whiners on the playback side, it's reeeeeeeeeaaaaallllly hard for anyone with a clue to see how an argument convincing to a shareholder could be made that it would be worthwhile even then.

    It'd make good business sense, too, ... having the free software movement on their side would help them immeasurably.

    If you actually have a quantifiable argument of sufficient quality to convince the Board of Directors, I can have it on Frank Casanova's desk within the day, and he can have it in front of the Board within a week.

    So put up or shut up.

  • MPEG-4 is NOT a codec (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think there is a little confusion on what a codec is. MPEG-4 is NOT a codec, it is an architecture (like QuickTime and to a much lesser degree Windows Media). An architecture controls everything from file formats to blitting algorithms to sound resampling to rich media support. A video codec turns uncompressed bitmaps into a binary stream and back again. It's an important part of the whole web video experience, but certainly less than half the work.

    There are PLENTY of MPEG-4 codecs, including several in development for QuickTime, and several different implementations for Windows Media. However, the MPEG-4 codec is only a small part of the full MPEG-4 spec and file format, which also includes audio codecs, client/server negotiation, packet recovery and retransmission, rich media support like text tracks and clickable hotspots, and lots of other groovy stuff.

    XAnim may someday have MPEG-4 codec support, but that doesn't mean it'd be able to play any but the simplest MPEG-4 files, and then only via local playback or TCP. MPEG-4 file playback is probably an order of magnitude more complex than the entierly of XAnim today, with its primative support for lossless binary streams of linear media.

    This is HARD stuff people, which is why teams of experts spend years designing these things. We're talking many engineer years to do even a basic implementation or port.
  • I'm not sure I see how releasing a binary-only closed-source version of anything would make someone more a friend of the open-source movement. They have released a good deal of OSS, and it's a little disingenuous to carp that they're not a friend of the movement because they haven't released the particular bit that *you'd* like to see. By your argument SGI isn't an open-source contributor because they've only released XFS and I'd really like to see CXFS. Get it straight - that concerns me, or you, but not the open-source movement.

    Releasing a binary-only version for (presumably) x86 Linux would only help x86 Linux users, like (presumably) you. It wouldn't help Linux users on other platforms, or users of other x86 platforms, and would generally fly in the face of one of the main points of the open-source movement - platform independence. It would make you happier as a whiny seeker of free-beer software for the platform you happen to be using, but I personally couldn't care less about that, and neither would "the open-source movement" (whomever that is).

  • I would think a MacOSX version of Quicktime would be the one which they'd choose to port to Linux, since OSX is based upon FreeBSD.

    Darwin, the MacOSX kernel, is based on a NetBSD layer around the Mach microkernel. That doesn't mean apps are actually written to POSIX; AFAIK, QuickTime for MacOSX is written to the Carbon API (a reimplementation of Toolbox, the Mac API, around Darwin and the new proprietary GUI stuff). And NetBSD doesn't have Carbon.


    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • The biggest problem I've seen with how the MPEG group works is that it allows patented technologies into the standard without requiring (as the JPEG group requires) a royalty-free license from the patent owner to use the technology for implement the standard.
    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!

  • Regardless of the grammatical correctness discussed elsewhere, I'm curious as to how a codec can be incompatible with Unix. Not currently implemented for Unix, yes, but incompatible, no. It's just a stream of bytes at the end of the day -- and that's *very* compatible with Unix.

    Any stream of bytes is compatible with the UNIX® components that correspond to GNU Fileutils [gnu.org] (`chgrp', `chmod', `chown', `cp', `dd', `df', `dir', `dircolors', `du', `install', `ln', `ls', `mkdir', `mkfifo', `mknod', `mv', `rm', `rmdir', `sync', `touch', and `vdir'). On the other hand, GNU Binutils [gnu.org] (`ar', `c++filt', `demangle', `gas', `gprof', `ld', `nlmconv', `nm', `objcopy', `objdump', `ranlib', `size', `strings', and `strip') and GNU libc [gnu.org] are the packages that really matter for building and running programs on a GNU/Linux system, and they can't handle Win32 very well ;-)


    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!

  • Now, whether Apple will do the legwork to port the libs

    The libs in question are mostly the Carbon libraries. The Carbon API is a reimplementation of the Toolbox API of MacOS 1 through 9; it's one of the things you pay $2,000 for when you buy a Macintosh® computer.

    Fat chance Apple will port it.


    <O
    ( \
    XPlay Tetris On Drugs [8m.com]!
  • There's a big reason why quicktime runs millions of times better on a mac than a pc - Apple ported basically all of their Mac OS foundation code to the PC to get Quicktime up and running. So, it's a bunch of unoptimized code running on the wrong platform. Similarly, Microsoft did the same thing for all their Mac products.

  • sigh

    To Anonymous Cowards 1, 2, and 3:

    I'm not comparing apples to oranges here. When I say that Mediaplayer plays the same files with half the overhead, I mean the same files, not ones encoded with different codecs. Plus, the clunky interface just annoys me.

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