Quicktime and the Snow Leopard

Bernard Devlin bdrunrev at gmail.com
Mon Sep 7 12:01:47 EDT 2009


I've been exploring QT a lot in the past few months for a project I
have in mind.  And the changes from QT7 to QTX do give me cause for
concern.  Especially since so much of the information on QT on
developer.apple.com has been marked as 'legacy'.

Since Apple has spent so long building on top of QT, it probably was
in need of a re-write (which appears to be what they've done).  The
question is what is left of the old QT, and what past functionality
has been lost.  Following the link on developer.apple.com for "What's
New in Quicktime" brings one to this page:
http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/whatsnew.htm , where there is
absolutely zero information on QTX (in fact, there's nothing there on
QT7.3 to QT7.6) .  That gives me the impression of a technology that
Apple does not see as relevant to developers.

It seems that there are many businesses that were built around adding
functionality to QT that have gone to the wall.  And many books on QT
can be picked up on amazon for a couple of dollars (I bought a handful
myself in the last few months).

I've no doubt that QT is still an important part of Apple's delivery
mechanism for iTunes.  But maybe they've ceded the area of multimedia
delivery to Flash.  It's a pity, as working with QT seems a lot easier
than working with Flash.

I don't think that QT can be particularly important for RunRev anyway,
since there's been a long-standing bug with stacks that have QT
players on them being able to have a title
(http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=6235).

Bernard

On Mon, Sep 7, 2009 at 4:13 PM, Richmond
Mathewson<richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have just been reading this:
> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/09/01/inside_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_quicktime_x.html
>
> this, particularly:
>
> "the new QuickTime X doesn't do everything that the previous QuickTime 7.x
> does, such as providing complex transcoding options, component plugins for
> installing alternative codecs, or the ability to hint tracks for RTSP
> streaming via QuickTime Streaming Server. That's why Apple includes an
> updated version of the previous QuickTime 7.x player as an optional install
> in Snow Leopard to handle all of those features. "
>
> which would seem to suggest that if one authors for Mac OS 10.6 one cannot
> really rely on Quicktime as we
> on Mac 10.4 and 10.5 understand it. This may impinge on how Revolution
> leverages Quicktime for its
> multimedia capabilities.
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