Quicktime 6 demoed, but delayed because of licensing issues

[simX]

I watched the Quicktime Live! keynote, and Apple demoed Quicktime 6! They said they had a working preview, but could not deliver it because of licensing concerns; QT6 has MPEG2 playback built-in (!), as well as MPEG4 decoding and encoding. There was also a new version of QT Streaming Server (version 4) demoed, and is available today. Also, a new application, called QuickTime broadcaster (not sure exactly what it does because I got cut off of the broadcast) which is going to be free, but also delayed because of licensing issues.

Here's the problem. Apple said that this is what is proposed for licensing:

$0.25 for each decoder, $1 million cap per year
$0.25 for each enconder, $1 million cap per year
$0.02 for each hour of content, to be paid by the content distributor (from what I understand)

Obviously it is this last thing that is affecting the deployment -- Phil Schiller said that Apple would be more than happy to pay $2 million a year to release QuickTime 6.

So send an e-mail to licensing@mpegla.com to voice your concern over MPEG4 licensing issues, and help Apple release QT6!

[fryke]

If anything else fails, Apple could help Open Source developers write plugins that encode and decode MPEG4. Although not officially. How long until a not-to-be-released copy is found around the net?

[wdw_]

Yes!Yes!YES!

[ulrik]

MPEG 2 playback! Finally my dream came true! Finally I can watch SVCDs, finally I don't have to fight with this crappy VLC-player!

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

[wdw_]

for more detail, go here:

http://maccentral.macworld.com//news/0202/12.qt6.php

[MacLegacy]

I hope they get those licensing issues set ASAP!!
and I hope Apple won't make us pay to be able to actually download the movies or play them full screen... ie : not only make that possible in pro version

[Krevinek]

I don't think that is going to change, since Apple has to pay up 1 million just for licensing MPEG-4 playback per year. Then they have MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 licenses, then the licenses for the other non-Apple codecs, Flash 5... then pretty much double that for the Pro copies floating around... oh, and that pesky development cost too... you get the idea.

They have to give some incentive to pay the 20$ so that they can at least partially recoup the cost of development. 2 million isn't that big a deal per year, but if you are looking at something closer to about 10-20 million per year and you start running into issues and needing to recoup the cost somehow, despite the subsidization by hardware.

Either way I am stoked by the MPEG-4 codecs displayed. This might actually mean that I can grab digital anime fansubs in something other than DivX in the coming year. I have had so many quality issues with poor DivX codecs on both Mac and PC, and with MPEG-4 managing to match/beat the quality/size levels DivX can produce will hopefully get a little more cross-platform-friendly format for those who freely/cheaply produce content for people. Heck, I know for a fact that audio track can be halved by going from DivX/MP3 to MPEG-4. Hell, getting a full-rez DVD-like stream over a cable modem is drool-worthy

[ulrik]

Originally posted by Krevinek
I don't think that is going to change, since Apple has to pay up 1 million just for licensing MPEG-4 playback per year. Then they have MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 licenses, then the licenses for the other non-Apple codecs, Flash 5... then pretty much double that for the Pro copies floating around... oh, and that pesky development cost too... you get the idea.

Flash 5 codec is open source.