Media playback… um…. er…. Apple vs Windows playback has been a conundrum for a long time…but with the upcoming Quicktime X in the next (intel only! not PPC) Apple 10.6 (Snow Leopard) your media capture and playback on your Apple will be faster, smoother and perhaps delicious….
• 64-bit application
• New streamlined user interface
• Improved performance
• Pro and Standard versions combined into one
• Supports OpenCL for accelerated video playback
• Intel only; no PowerPC version
• Frameless window
• ColorSync support
• Syncs with iTunes, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, and more
But you know Windows users had to deal with less consistent Quicktime for windows software so often Vista was a complete waste of time for Windows users with some content- many folks reverting or staying with XP and letting Explorer or RealPlayer deal with stuff. Aside from MS Silverlight.
Silverlight is pretty popular (the 2008 Olympics/NBC last summer used Silverlight as its “premiere showcase” and it will stream the 2010 winter olympics with Silverlight) but Vista could not deal very well with “Apple- centric” files outside of using the QT windows installer.
So FYI Windows 7 has enormously improved support for media playback, and now will play most QuickTime-exported files out of the box.
Here’s what’s new/changed (from Vista):
* MPEG-4
* MPEG-4, QuickTime, 3GPP, and AVCHD file formats
* MPEG-4 Part 2 (SP and ASP)
* H.264 (up to High, all levels)
* AAC, including LC and HE v1 and v2, and multichannel
* “DivX/xvid” AVI
* MPEG-4 part 2 ASP
* MP3 and MS ADPCM
* MPEG-2
* Program and Transport Streams, including HDV
* MPEG-2 up to 1080i/p
* H.264 up to High
* Dolby Digital, PCM, and MP2
Windows 7 will play .mp4, self-contained .mov files that are using MPEG-4 codecs, H.264 interlaced, MPEG-4 Advanced Simple, HE AAC decode, and integrated MPEG-2. And interlace ( 30i gets displayed as 60) It’s also got further improved hardware acceleration, so even Netbooks can generally play back 720p content. Most DirectX10/DXVA 2.0 GPUs will hardware accelerate all codecs.- not quite sure how QT X corresponds here(aside from the performance accelerating kick Snow Leopard is promising) but indeed it makes content a little less dependent on accumulating 3rd party plugins and various degrees of performance issues.
We’ll see if the internet gives cable tv a run for the money (and it should…) once these updates in OSes and bandwidth improves…
Streaming is again coming of age- live broadcasts should be available on your Phones soon (http streaming really simplifies this process) Those of you with iPhones…check out http://iphone.akamai.com/ on your iPhone!
very groovy