but apparently the MPAA has been difficult about the licensing terms, and QT6
is a pretty big upgrade with full MPEG-4 support. The upgrade from QT4 to 5 was not as significant as this one.
I don' t really know how QT's licensing works, but it would be nice if Apple could change the distribution of QT:
They should still let you get the free version of QT Player that decodes everything, but change the Pro version distribution so if you want to encode video, you only have to buy the codecs you actually are going to use.
Plus, if they made QT modular like this, you would only have to buy a new codec license everytime the codec was updated, not every time Apple updates QT. Sure, Apple would want some money for developing a new version of QT, but since it is basically a front end for codecs like MPEG-2/QT/Sorenson whose licenses don't need to be renewed past the first payment (I think) then why not save some cash and only register for the new codecs? (i.e. not have lots of extra unnecessary licenses for MPEG-2 from each QT- upgrade?)
Case in point: QT6 currently supports Flash 5, not 6 - the newest version. If Apple made QT6 more modular, then we could just download a Flash upgrade instead of wait for QT7 (which will probably support Flash 6 the moment Flash 7 comes out
Actually, I guess that's a bad example because no one uses QT to author Flash - but you get the point. ;P
Somehow I am surprised that QT6 was released for OS X.1 instead of being Jaguar exclusive? Thanks Apple for not making us wait any longer!