ZnU wrote:
> In article <7Rhkh.21157$RR4.18001@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> Lawson English <LawsonE@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
>> Lawson English wrote:
>> [...]
>>> Here's a summary of features of MPEG-4 that might be doable with iTV .
>>> iTunes + iLife + iTV could be THE killer combo for MPEG-4. If iTV
caught
>>> on in a big way, cable-providers might start selling MPEG-4-based
>>> advertising for playback through iTV. Scary.
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/pubs/presentations/pdffiles/mpeg4gat.pdf
>> So MPEG-4 is dead, except as a better codec?
>
> Interactive features in video formats -- which QuickTime has sup****ted
> practically forever -- have never caught on for any but the most trivial
> purposes.
There's a difference between sup****ting it in libraries and providing
tools to create it. Where's the iMovie tool to create interactive
buttons in QuickTime movies, for instance? You gotta pay relatively big
bucks to do that for Flash. I don't think any cheap product exists to do
it in QT.
VRML was a big flop.
Its a standards thing. There's bunches of conflicting content-creation
software that don't quite sup****t even the same bits of VRML 1.0
letalone w3d or whatever the new standard is called.
And some of the other stuff, like the
> face coding, might be useful if bandwidth was severely restricted, but
> it's not these days. Moreover, just because all of this stuff is lumped
> into one huge standard doesn't necessarily make it any more likely to
> get implemented.
No-one expected it to ALL be implemented in one product, but I suspect
that people are surprised at how little is being used. You still don't
get multiple-language sup****t from iTunes as far as I can tell. Of
course, I don't know that iTunes exposes controls for video to display
subtitles, and iPod video has been MPEG-4 based from the start, and that
kind of thing is an MPEG-2 standard.
>
> Maybe you'll see MPEG-4 movies distributed with chapter stops and menus,
> like DVDs. I don't imagine these features will be used for much else.
>
Those are MPEG-2 level. There should massive sup****t from Apple for 3rd
party plug-ins for iTunes and iLife and yet there isn't ANY, as far as
I know. iTunes enhancement should be a major industry for developers and
content-creators on the Mac side of things, and yet there is nothing.
> I find it quite entertaining that even Flash is probably used more
> commonly today to deliver video content than the interactive content it
> was originally designed to deliver.
>
I don't think that that is quite true. Plenty of websites implement
simple buttons and other GUI stuff using Flash, even though they don't
provide any kind of video content as far as the end-user is concerned.
Animation studies/special FX studios were using Flash+webbrowser to
create GUI front-ends to Maya until the latest version when web browser
sup****t was removed.
> Hopefully Adobe will take note and
> implement H.264 in it. (As things stand now, flash video is 2-3 times
> as large as H.264 QuickTime for similar quality.)
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