AW: Flash or Quicktime?
Jeff Reynolds
jeff at siphonophore.com
Fri Feb 15 12:46:37 EST 2008
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.
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