[ANN] Quicktime Issues Wiki

Wed Nov 1 22:16:32 EST 2006

Wonderful post!

"Don't look for QT to replace Flash across the board.  It won't. "

Fair enough. Having done a miniscule bit of work in Flash, they
are certainly worlds apart and having the expectation that
QT should to what Flash does "across the board"
is probably too much to ask...

Your post would indicate "all is well with QT, just don't expect to
make chapatis with it."   But I think Stephan's original point
though is still good, answer to Greg's issues:
  identify some subset of functions we would
like to have in QT that are now only available in Flash and tell
Apple about it.

e.g.  I didn't see any reference to SMIL (my chapati) in the
"Directions and Shifts of Emphasis in Quicktime 7" (yes -- very interesting
and encouraging to read that...)

Goal would be: to use XML to "talk" to the video region in a streamed 
context
  in ways that can be scripted vs sitting in Final Cut Pro and building 
it all into a
single .mov file. If QT SMIL support is not advancing, is there
an alternative that accomplishes the same thing?

I guess that is a question for Apple.

Re the streaming problem on some of our windows users machines.
I've isolated it to  differences in connectivity that QT player can
handle, but which the Rev Player object cannot.  I'm going to
get a bit more info from our users and will post a BugZilla
on it when we have the data...

I'm not privy to the depth of relationship between Rev Engineers
and Apples QT team, but would hope that it got really "tight."
to help solve such issues.

You main point is good:

QT looks very healthy on both platforms for the future, no need to "fret."

Especially if one is going to create desktop apps then the Revolution 
Framework
with QT embedded will let us do just about anything we want that we might
try in Flash...

(linux?? is another story...)

Sivakatirswami

Trevor DeVore wrote:
> 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 enhhttp://www.hitsquad.com/smm/mac/KEYBOARDS_ON_PC/ancement 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
> 
> 
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-- 
Om shanti
(In  Peace)

Sivakatirswami
www.himalayanacademy.com

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