QuickTime 7.4 is out, and word on the street is that you should avoid it like the plague, especially if you are running After Effects or Adobe Premier. After Effects renders are failing around the ten minute mark, using a variety of QT codecs. The suspicion is that this is a result of the new DRM system Apple has implemented to enable iTunes movie downloads, but there's nothing official from Apple, yet. (Yet another example of why DRM is evil.)
Remember when QuickTime was aiming to be a universal media container, handling all kinds of content? It was the swiss army knife of media handlers. Seems like recently QT has fallen on hard times, or, perhaps more likely, has become more important to Apple as a delivery mechanism for iTunes content than as a tool for content creators. The disabling of Flash capabilities in QT has caused a world of hurt for developers who depended on this functionality. Some content creators are calling for the development of an open-source, universal media container.
I remember my first Apple CD-ROM drive, which shipped with a bunch of (oooh!) interactive CD titles, including "From Alice to Ocean," the first to use QuickTime. We hosed that CD drive to our Quadra 700, running the Mac version of Video Machine (Yes, there was a Mac version, yes, we were the first in USA to have it, yes, it was ultimately a tragic story, and yes, I will share all of the sordid details in a future blog entry...) and staying up late into the night playing Myst (mapping those damn tunnels!) and, later, Marathon.
QuickTime was amazing back then. It's not going away any time soon, but it sure would be nice to see Apple treat is with a bit more respect and take more care with testing before releasing a version show-stopping bugs for content creators.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
QuickTime 7.4 - Ugh...
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