Quick time real alternative9/16/2023 And we are no longer are bound to proprietary software for playing simple movie clips. I am really glad more open codecs (MPEG4, DivX) took over. I remember something like 320×240 level performance on early Pentiums, and some other higher resolutions on newer machines.Īgain, it was a completely closed codec, with no viable alternative at the time. BTW there are no new rollouts of H.264 on new platforms.īack in the day, before YouTube, before even Real Player, the only way to play movie trailers on the PC was using QuickTime and SVQ1 codec. Same way that DVD-Video content is still Mpeg2 and some EU countries still use Mpeg2 for SD broadcasts. H.264 is the format used for Blu-Ray HD content and for HD TV transmissions for compatibility reasons. – HEVC broadcasts (4K HLG) are already happening in Europe, and HEVC has been standardised as a mandatory codec for ATSC 3.0. AV1 is exclusively used for HDR and 8K content. – YouTube has already switched to VP9 for web browsers and for clients that support it (and only serves H.264 for backwards compatibility reasons), and YouTube 4K is served exclusively in VP9. Nothing can be optimised further or done in a different way with 20 years of chip innovation? H.264 is nearly 20 years old and still the “best” available? – Collaborative codecs such as AV1 that are giving the above a run for their money (aka patent royalties) – Combined ISO and ITU efforts following the combined ISO and ITU effort known as H.264. Let me reflect that back then… Since the death of competition in the sector (QuickTime, Real, etc), where is innovation coming from? Tl dr: MOV doesn’t provide any meaningful choice anymore, it’s just a pesky deviation from MP4 nowadays. That’s the whole story of internet video right there. By that time Apple and Microsoft had worked themselves in the patent pools deeply enough that they decided to support HEVC instead. Then VP9 and AV1 were created as additional options (though without paying the patent holders to bugger off this time). Then On2 kind-of caught up with VP8, which Google bought (and opened) and paid the patent holders to bugger off. Then H.264 (and more specifically the x264 encoder) came and steamrolled everything because the bitrate advantages were actually worth the “content fee” (plus it could be hardware-accelerated, being an ISO standard and all). And those formats had to be kept proprietary and closed so that the MPEG LA patent holders couldn’t analyse the specification and assert patents on it (Microsoft made the mistake of opening WMV9 as VC-1 under the belief it didn’t violate any patents, and ooops! the patent holders started pointing at parts of the specification and asserting patents on them, so a MPEG LA patent pool was formed). So, many companies big and small (Microsoft, Apple, Sorenson, Real Media, Duck/On2) started developing proprietary codecs to provide an option for royalty-free internet video that was better than M-JPEG. You see, Mpeg1, Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 Part 2 all required a “content fee” but didn’t offer much of a bitrate advantage over M-JPEG to justify that cost. Look, I understand why so many companies developed proprietary video stream formats in the 1990s and 2000s. The only “advantage” of MOV nowadays is that it can include non-compatible audio (using the Apple audio formats) in order to make conversion to standard MP4 harder. What “choice” is there exactly? For a long time now, MOV/QT stopped evolving its proprietary formats and they went with AVC/H.264. To give credit where credit is due, Microsoft did the right thing and made sure there is no confusion between DirectShow and the WMV and WMA formats by simply giving them separate names instead of going down the “let’s confuse everyone” route like Apple did when they named everything “QuickTime”. So, we are now in the situation where QuickTime (the framework) is dead but QuickTime (the format) lives on because those old videos have to be playable, so you hear confusing statements such as “QuickTime is dead but you can still play QuickTime media”. But anyway MOV/QT is a format in its own right, and it’s also called “QuickTime”. Files with a MOV extension can also take AVC/H.264 video streams like MP4 files can and can also take M-JPEG (Nikon cameras used this). And although the container is the same specification which defines the MP4 container, MOV and QT files are allowed to contain additional proprietary video streams (the most common being Road Pizza aka RPZA and Sorenson Media Video 1 and 3 aka SVQ1 and SVQ3). It’s also a video format (it uses the filename extensions MOV and QT). It’s more than a framework (set of libraries).
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