Re: The Path of GNUstep (Was: Re: Gnustep + mac + windows? Possible?)

[Chris Hanson]

At 12:09 PM -0400 9/24/02, Jason Clouse wrote:
> I know that the QuickTime thing really sucks and all.  But are people
> really flocking to OS X just to be able to write applications that employ
> QuickTime?  I could see that for multimedia players and so forth but....

Yes, people really are flocking to Mac OS X to be able to write 
applications that employ QuickTime.  QuickTime isn't just a 
multimedia playback engine.  QuickTime is a complete framework for 
dealing with time-based media.  Creating, editing, manipulating, 
capturing, outputting, previewing...

This is a mistake that the Open Source community *consistently* makes 
when it comes to QuickTime and multimedia as a whole.  QuickTime is 
the framework that underlies the tools of choice for professional A/V 
production for a reason.

One way that this mistake is made is to focus on CODECs and file 
formats rather than generic APIs and broad flexibility.  A QuickTime 
movie conceptually consists of any number of "tracks" -- audio 
tracks, video tracks, effects tracks, etc.  Tracks can have any 
number of "media."  Media in turn have samples.  It's the *media* 
that are typed according to what CODEC they use, not the *tracks*.

As far as I understand it, even Ogg screws this up; you can't find 
all of the audio streams in an Ogg file, you need to know in advance 
that Vorbis streams are audio and so are Speex streams and so are PCM 
streams and...

QuickTime is huge and extremely flexible and extremely useful in a 
wide variety of projects.

  -- Chris

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Chris Hanson                      |  Email: cmh@bDistributed.com
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