[ANN] Quicktime Issues Wiki

[Trevor DeVore]

On Nov 1, 2006, at 2:52 AM, Sivakatirswami wrote:

> I was just shaking the tree to see if any mangoes  would fall out.
>
> Aha! there's one from Trevor.
>
> Of course QT is not dead. It's a question
> of whether it has a pulse or is just there as a delivery window that
> may or may not work, depending...."is an architecture that enhances
> the playback environment, be in browser or desktop application."
> as you put it... that's simply not enough...the API has to be solid,
> cross platform stable, documented, moving forward... (viz-a-viz
> our other thread on streaming failures on Windows...)

Hi Sivakatirswami,

Here are some of my comments in regards to your points above, though  
the first one relates to what Greg was looking for.

When QuickTime 3 added an interactivity layer it interested a lot of  
people.  QuickTime 4 and 5 saw some enhancements to the interactivity  
layer but it was clear that this was not Apple's primary focus with  
the QT technology.  Greg's comments seemed to deal with this area of  
QuickTime.  Don't look for QT to replace Flash across the board.  It  
won't.  There are some projects where the interactive layer of QT  
adds a lot of nice benefits though.

Regarding the QT API - QuickTime has a very solid and robust API.   
Like any framework it has it's bugs it is used in a lot of  
applications on both Windows and OS X.  iTunes relies on QuickTime so  
you know Apple is putting time into making audio/video work really  
well on Windows, whether progressively downloading or playing locally.

Regarding documentation - Though documentation wasn't always great in  
the past, QT documentation has seen major improvements lately.  New  
articles are being posted at http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/ on  
a regular basis.

Regarding moving forward - Take a look at the QuickTime 7.1 Update  
Guide at http://developer.apple.com/documentation/QuickTime/ 
Conceptual/QT7-1_Update_Guide/index.html.  In particular, look for  
the section entitled "Directions and Shifts of Emphasis in QuickTime  
7".  Also take a look at "Advantages For Windows Developers".  One  
major enhancement for QT video playback on Windows was the visual  
context support for Direct3D.  QuickTime is trying to embrace the  
technologies of each platform (OpenGL support was added in a previous  
QT 7 release) so it can perform better.

Regarding the streaming failure - As you know, this problem some of  
your testers have experienced is very difficult to pin down and has  
not been reproduced by anyone else so it is very hard to fix.  The  
movies play in QT Player and browsers but report an obscure error  
when running in Rev.  While this is definitely something that people  
want to see fixed I don't think we can interpret this as meaning that  
QT is not moving forward.

Also regarding whether Rev will be in synch with QuickTime in 2009 -  
QuickTime is a framework that is meant to be used in other  
applications.  It is a HUGE framework but luckily Rev only has to  
support basic playback and expose certain properties (like  
movieControllerID).  Anyone can then use those properties to access  
the majority of the QT framework if they need to.


-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Learning Systems - www.bluemangolearning.com
trevor at bluemangolearning.com