Quicktime 6 demoed, but delayed because of licensing issues

simX

Unofficial Mac Genius
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!
 
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?
 
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!
 
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 :(
 
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 :D
 
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.
 
Good point, but the general idea still stands.

Apple's iApps revolve around Quicktime, and because of that, the main cash outflow seems to be QT. Their OS is subsidized by the hardware, which can also cover the other stuff to some extent, but QT has gotten a little to vast to be subsidized solely by the hardware. 20$ to me is a fair price to pay to help chip in for the Pro features. I am pissed off about the lack of full screen and the large streams without Pro myself, but I have to pay the 20$ anyways to do some of the stuff I do.
 
Sure they have to get some money too to pay the licensing and stuff but they should at least let us download the movies and play em fullscreen without the pro version..! Then i'd be happy ;)

I'm very enthusiastic about the MPEG-4 codec, many pc encoded files can't be read without DIVX player and still it lacks performance sometimes.

I hope they make it available for OS 9 too!! :(
 
MPEG-4 will probably have similar issues to DivX speed-wise. I wouldn't be surprised if this was a MacOS X only release, but they may surprise me and allow my old machine to play MPEG-4.
 
I don't think so. The "speed" problem with DivX on the Mac is only because he has to detect the previous keyframe, which is a great thing! On a PC, you can jump into any part of the movie, but the movie will be distorted (since DivX uses the wrong Cosinus-waves to build the artefacts) until the next keyframe is reached. Since Quicktime has a great Keyframe detection, it just takes itself some time to scan for the keyframe previous and next to the selected time and display the movie CORRECT! If you mean the speed issues on PCs, they won't happen since DivX on the Mac has no post correction features. And I am SURE that MPEG 4 will be "faster" since the MPEG-4 codec uses a different kind of keyframe detection by taking the adress of the previous keyframe with it into ANY frame, from which again it can calculate the next keyframe and so it can really fast detect the the decoding parameters it needs to translate the cosinus waves.
 
I am well aware of the keyframe issues, but that isn't what I was referring to. I was referring to the slow-as-molasses speed on anything earlier than an iMac, and even early iMacs choke on un-beautified DivX.

BTW, I use both DivX.com's 4.11 alpha codec for the Mac, which works pretty well, and removes the annoying artifacts DivX Player lets through, at roughly the same speed of display.

However, jumping from 0 to 5 fps on the display of Full Metal Panic just will not do. (640x480 framesize, QT is accelerated with a Voodoo5) So, the result is that I have to re-encode the DivX into a comparable filesize using H.261 for the video. The quality is noticably worse: gradient artifacts (where a block is encoded as a gradient but is the wrong way), and an overall fuzzier image. However, I can easily pull 24 fps using H.261 so that is what I am using now. MPEG-4 will have the same types of stumbling blocks for the most part, even if I am able to achieve 10 fps instead of 4-5 fps. Plus QT6 includes post-processing similar to the newer DivX codecs which helps account for the crisp image, even with slow connections and the lower bitrate video/audio.

This is what makes me think it will probably be OS X & Win32 only and with the 'works on any machine that will work with OS X' if it isn't OS X only. Heck, even on a PC they recommend you to use a PII 450-500Mhz or better if you want decent DivX playback.
 
I never said you wouldn't. The iMacs were the start of a system arch that is nearly a leap above the 604/603 based Macs. My gf has one of the first-rev iBook 500 and plays DivX without any real problems until I turned up the post-processing.

With Apple's lack of support for pre-iMac machines since the public beta of OS X, I would be very surprised if MPEG-4 could play any better than DivX does.
 
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