AW: Flash or Quicktime?

[Jeff Reynolds]

its a bit more than throwing the qt installer on and sending them a  
couple copies of your disc. you must install qt with your product w.o  
the user being able to stop the qt installation. it was all a bit of  
hassle and it changes (another pain). in the past they have done  
things like your application had to only work with the version of qt  
on the disc or above (not nice since my apps usually work with very  
old qt version on older systems fine, no reason to force upgrades on  
them). basically if you want to ship qt with your product apple wants  
to use you to move the world forward into the newer. also if they  
change the license terms you have to agree if you want to continue  
your license.

also if a new version of qt comes you must replace it on your product  
w/in 6 months. not fun again once you are golden and have a bunch of  
cds sitting there... we had an older VB based product that used qt and  
required one extension from a very old version of qt be installed to  
run, but on newer OS you also needed a full newer version of QT  
installed. this was a mess since apple wanted us to loose the old qt  
files completely when we were re-releasing it, but we did not have the  
source for the VB and couldnt figure out what was needed or change  
this. finally got the nudge, nudge, wink, wink, to ship it with both  
and the convoluted installation as there was no way the product was  
going to be reworked to fix it, but there was still a strong education  
demand for the product.

you can find the current apple agreements at the apple site http://developer.apple.com/softwarelicensing/agreements/quicktime.html 
. like i said over the last decade or so that i have dealt with on  
many project it keeps evolving, sometimes simple and straight forward  
and sometimes more complicated to deal with. We have finally given up  
on the cdroms and just put the link in all the readmes and docs to the  
quicktime.com website to get the qt installer if they need it. so far  
this has only caused a problem for the schools in the Mariana Islands  
in the South Pacific with low bandwidth connections. i ended up  
sending them some discs with only the qt installer only burned on them  
and they passed them out to the islands, problem solved.

not to say qt is not great at solving lots of multimedia problems,  
just including the qt installer does raise a few issues you must be  
prepared to deal with. this come into focus more if your product is  
going though a publisher who is assuming some of the rights/licensing/ 
production as they may not like to deal with some of the installer  
license details.

On flash videos it sounds like yours our short, but on longer ones  
(like 5-10 minutes) the audio can sometimes get out of synch with the  
video under flash videos compared qt which seems to do a very good job  
of making sure audio and video keep synched.

Flash also has had a history of version conflicts, so what ever you do  
with it you need to make sure you if cross one of those lines and if  
you have a plan.

on the H264 it really takes the processor power on the encoding step,  
not seen a problem with playback on older machines yet. lots of the  
world is going h264 these days...

cheers

jeff reynolds


On Feb 15, 2008, at 11:20 AM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

>>
>>
>> Yes I thought about putting the installer on DVD-ROM, thought apple
>> doesn't
>> like it...
>
> They don't mind at all. You just have to sign an agree with them, and
> send two copies of the final product as part of that agreement.