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Thursday, June 12, 2008
Remember the first version of Windows Media Player that came with Windows95? Ya, it was a joke. A big one. When compared to Apple’s QuickTime (QT), Microsoft had a long road of acquisitions ahead of it. Instead of standing still Apple pushed the envelope with QuickTime and added innovating features such as QuickTime VR. QT VR allowed a user to “spin” an object 360 degrees around and look up and down a bit with the movement of their mouse. This was a decade before it showed up in Flash on web sites! As the web became popular, Apple’s attention to it gave programmers interaction (QTi in 1998) with its users.
But Apple’s direction seemed to have made a change by 2002 when it released 6.x. Now supporting the competition through Flash 5 and scriptable ActiveX controls, outside of MPEG-4 support, there was little innovation anymore. Certainly the release of 7.x and H.264 was a great addition; however, by this time, less and less use of QuickTime could be found on the web. Flash was king and QuickTime seemed to no longer sing. While Adobe was thrusting user interaction features to developers in Flash, Apple seemed to slowly add a bread crumb here and a bread crumb there to QuickTime ignoring the flashy San Jose-based company’s web progress.
What used to be considered an excellent medium for multimedia presentation on the web is now not even considered by most web developers today. Apple’s limited supply of user interaction has left it in the cold of consideration and oddly enough, Apple doesn’t even seem to care. Using the same underlying architecture created in 1991, QuickTime is the heart and soul of iTunes and thus seems to be Apple’s only true intention for this multimedia maverick. With all the money Apple paid Apple Records, Ltd. in settlement fees all those years ago, one would think any company with half the brains of Apple would push such a ground breaking application. So why the disinterest? What happened? While Apple announced QuickTime X this week at WWDC 2008, it won’t be out for at least another year in which its market share will have been even more eroded. Even upon release, will it deliver?
SvenOnTech has spoken to and heard many developers complain about QuickTime. The complaints range from how heavy QuickTime is now (does Microsoft make this?) to its near zero user interaction interface. Even though it looks great for movie trailers and other video footage, the latest version of Flash handles this just as well if not better because of all the other goodies that come along with it. QuickTime is just not usable anymore. Sad. Once die-hard fans of the multimedia application are now completely ignoring it, just like Apple.
June 13th, 2008 at 7:30
Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, a streamlined, next-generation platform that advances modern media and Internet standards. QuickTime X features optimized support for modern codecs and more efficient media playback, making it ideal for any application that needs to play media content.
Because Snow Leopard delivers the fastest implementation of JavaScript to date, web applications are more responsive. Safari runs JavaScript up to 53 percent faster with Snow Leopard.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:12
Sven: Paragraph 3, line 3 “QuickTime is the heart and …”
“Sole” means alone, or the only one. Also, it is the underside of your feet or the underside of your shoes, and it is a type of flatfish (solea solea).
You mean “soul” which is the spiritual part of a human, or the embodiment of some quality.
I know what you meant, but it may detract from your message.
June 13th, 2008 at 8:25
Luaan: yes, it sounds very promising, but from what I see on my iPhone, there is little difference in interaction with QT than there is on a regular desktop. In fact, all embedded QT movies on web sites OPENS QT as a separate program. Further, it still far lacks anything Flash has. Again, the post does touch on the fact that QT X is coming, but will it be worth it?
Mario: thanks for the correction. Even after re-reading it twice (and it did seem wrong then), I guess I’m just not as sharp at 1:00 in the morning as I am in the day.
Again, thanks for the correction and being very kind in your comments.
June 13th, 2008 at 9:45
Can you please make your website’s font even smaller? I think there are still a few young souls that can still read it!
June 13th, 2008 at 9:50
The embedded QuickTime files on this website open in the browser, not in a seperate application.
http://members.cox.net/lendys/lendys5.htm
June 13th, 2008 at 9:51
LOL, sorry, Bob Bat. I agree, it is a bit on the small side. Though you’re the first to complain about it. I should look into popping up the font in the CSS. You can increase the size in Firefox 3.x (may work in older versions) but hitting Command + (or Control + in Windows). It’s a zoom features. Works nicely.
June 13th, 2008 at 9:56
Luann, I meant QT movies embedded in sites on the iPhone cause them to open in a QT application launch. They do not play within the web page you are viewing. Try this on an iPhone with your site you’ve offered for example. I understand that Apple believes that this is for optimal viewing experience; however, it was just to further the point that making light of its iPhone success with QT should be suspect since it still doesn’t offer the advantages of Flash.
June 14th, 2008 at 6:27
QT has sucked since Frank Casanova took over as the product head. He has had zero interest in pushing QT as a distribution tech since at least 2000 when H264 was integrated (it’s true - it’s taken almost 8 years for people to wake up to this awesome codec.). There is so much that could be done…where is wavelet compression? Why is the server languishing? Where is the support for the creative developer community? They pretty much gutted the marketing team and there are only a couple of people globally to grow this product outside of the demands of the video and audio app teams. At this point QT only exists to serve the needs of FCP, DVDSP, iMovie, iPhoto and iTunes. QTX is nothing more than a modern rebuild in order to make it more efficient for power hungry apps like FCP. At this point the distribution game has been ceded to Flash.
June 14th, 2008 at 9:28
I had to - painfully - revert to QT 7.3.1 in December 07 because an update killed my ability to view many mpegs in OS neXt 10.3.9. I’m afraid to install any upgrades now because Apple’s readme files don’t say a word about fixing it. Does anyone know TRUTH?
June 15th, 2008 at 20:11
Apple have never appeared consistently committed to QuickTime as an end user solution.
It began with the failure to offer a “multiple bandwidth in one file” streaming solution, like Intellistream or SureStream. This meant a webcaster had to set up multiple files, doubling or tripling storage requirements and complicating architectures and administration.
And Apple had no real equivalent for for Windows Media Encoder, which did an excellent job of live encoding. And then Apple’s MPEG4 codec was dreadful compared to the same era’s Windows Media - so no one WANTED a Mac solution.
And then H.264 turned out to be VERY computationally complex and nothing could live encode it at full size and all but the newest machines couldn’t play it back smoothly. Windows Media 9 then and now, produces comparable results on much less powerful machines.
And the player plug-in’s behaviour was not flexibly controllable on a web page.
As a content producer I love QuickTime – as an architecture, QuickTime is a work of art…. and I actually like the simplicity and effectiveness of QT player. I don’t have to battle past 87 marketing inspired features just to play the video.
The end user player is definitely iTunes now, so that’s the space to watch for developments.
September 16th, 2008 at 3:39
QuickTime is buggy. I need to change video compression settings of movies I receive so they will work in Pro Tools. In trying to use QuickTime Pro to do this, I open the movie in QuickTime Pro player and prove that it plays fine. I click file and chose export, choose file format of QuickTime Movie, click Options, then move on to the all important video settings dialog, BUT AS SOON AS I CLICK “SETTINGS”, QUICKTIME SHUTS DOWN. (By that I mean that it simply vanishes from the screen and I can watch it simultaneously vanish from the Windows Task Manager window also.) I have tried reinstalling QuickTime and the Repair option in Windows but to no avail. What the? -and then you hit the useless Apple support void.