Streaming Media - October/November 2007 - (Page 60) If you dig a little bit, though, you see that this picture isn’t as bleak as it looks on the surface. ITunes and your iPod and iPhone could not work without QuickTime handling the plumbing. And in all fairness, as Frank Casanova, Apple’s senior director for OS X video and audio product marketing pointed out, it makes more sense for QuickTime-related seminars and events to be incorporated into the WWDCs. “At the Worldwide Developers Conference this year,” he said, “we introduced a new Content and Media track directed at developers creating content for the web, iPod, Apple TV, and iPhone as well as developers creating rich Web 2.0 applications for iPhone and desktop web browsers using open standards like H.264, JavaScript, and AJAX. “WWDC is the perfect venue for all of our developers from traditional application developers to web and content authors. In addition to over 150 in-depth sessions, WWDC in 2007 had a ratio of four attendees to each Apple engineer, so it was easy to get all their questions answered and share code one-on-one with the Apple engineers.” whatever happened to QuickTime? “I’d expect that most content developers have QuickTime installed, if only because most pro software can use it to support source formats that [Microsoft’s] DirectShow doesn’t,” he says. “QuickTime Pro can be a handy little utility as well.” The Benefits of QuickTime I currently work in media production for a publisher of college textbooks. Virtually all of our vendors deliver to us in QuickTime because it’s still the best format from which to transcode to others (Real, Windows, Flash FLV, and SWFs). From a video quality standpoint, the H.264 codec certainly leaves Sorenson in the dust for the moment and offers producers a higher-quality source format from which to transcode their content in multiple formats at even smaller sizes. So in all likelihood, end users on PCs and portable devices are going to be seeing more—not fewer— videos and audio in QuickTime. It’s just that the software will be doing its job seamlessly, in the background. The Far Left. QuickTime might not always be visible, but whether you're using the iPod or the iPhone, it’s the “great-but-invisible plumbing” behind the scenes. Near Left. Though QuickTime isn’t going anywhere, the standalone QuickTime player is likely going to continue to become less and less popular. According to Charles Wiltgen, a veteran technology developer and QuickTime specialist, “From a consumer point of view, QuickTime is all about being the great-butinvisible plumbing, whether we’re talking PC or iPhone, as it should be. “Because it’s required by iTunes for Windows, it’s worth noting that it’s also required by proxy for iPhone and Apple TV, and also comes by default with Safari for Windows,” he adds. “So it’s safe to say that QuickTime is on more machines than ever before, and I would expect that to continue.” Additionally, the likely growth in mobile and MPEG-4 (AVC/H.264 and AAC) bodes well for QuickTime, Wiltgen says. 60 STREAMING MEDIA October/November 2007 QuickTime standalone player will be less and less in evidence. This very seamlessness of QuickTime in its version 7 iteration, its behind-the-scenes success, is unfortunately what has undercut the interactive features of the trusty standalone application, which still allows you to do a lot more than Windows Media Player or any other beginner desktop video player. It did, right from the beginning. In the early days of multimedia production, QuickTime was the dominant means of video delivery (even when the grainy Cinepak format was the only game in town), and one of its niftiest features was its ability to work with professional
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.