--- In [email protected], Vaj <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > On Dec 18, 2006, at 12:31 PM, Bhairitu wrote: > > >> > >> It sounds like I read the same press releases you did, as what you > >> are > >> saying is my recollection and understanding as well. > > Bingo, "press releases" are the operative words. And who does those? > > Marketing. I just went through a product release where marketing > > put a > > bunch of hype on the technology making it sound like it was much more > > than it actually was. > > > > I'm not saying that Apple products are bad or that their technology is > > bad. But to most of us in the industry they're just "another > > machine." :) > > > Well if I recall correctly what they said was that as a member of the > JPEG group they got the nod, that's all.
It's more than that. If you look at the overall description of MPEG-4, its pretty much what Apple had already stated they were trying to do with QuickTIme. Apple had already done the basic design work to implement an MPEG4-like file format called... QuickTime file format. MS was still playing simple movies on their video player while Apple was implementing multi-cultural extensions to MIDI in theirs, and games companies like Bungi (sp) were making it so players of the Marathon 3D network game could play back hours-long multi- player games from a quicktime file that was only a few hundred kilobytes. Basically, the game itself was the "codec" and the file was simply a recording of every player's moves, kept in chronological order with a time-stamp for each "frame" of user- input from the mouse and keyboard so the entire multi-player game could be recreated. The standard QuickTime controls were provided in an interface in the game so you could speed up or slow down the playback and jump from "camera" to "camera" (the viewpoint of each player) and see what your opponents saw as they shot you. At the time everyone was > worried MS would get it. Of course that hasn't stopped others from > having their own spec for MPEG-4. Personally I wish it was all Open > Source, seems to make much more sense for everybody. > > There's nothing more annoying than finding a website (for ex. VH1's > video section) that runs on only one OS and one browser. > There are various commercial codecs that implement pieces of MPEG-4 and there are licensing issues with some of the imaging and other formats, but the specification of MPEG-4 itself is pretty much open (you gotta pay a fee to get the full documentation, but its not a licensing fee, but a copying fee, as far as I know).
