In article <Ggkkh.29588$Rj.4317@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Lawson English <LawsonE@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> ZnU wrote:
> > In article <7Rhkh.21157$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.
So, application developers aren't any more interested than users, then.
> 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.
I don't think that was the problem. What's the use case for VRML on a
web page or a set-top box? I mean, I can think of a couple of things. It
would be neat to throw in 3D models of locations in movies as DVD extra
type content... but frankly this is the kind of gimmick that might get a
few more fans to buy the content, but would provide a grand total of
about five minutes worth of actual entertainment.
Back in the mid-90s, when VRML was supposed to the hot new thing, the
lack of standardization you describe above was true of the web in
general. Yet, the 2D web got fixed, and is now used by hundreds of
millions of people... while the "3D web" got talked up in press releases
for a couple of years and then went away.
Second Life is sort of interesting as an example of how you can actually
make networked 3D environments interesting, but it works on a
fundamentally different model from things like VRML, in that it presents
a unified multiuser world, not just isolated single-user 3D
environments. And I still don't see an amazing use case for integrating
it with other media at anything but the most superficial level (e.g.
allow it to be launched as a helper app from browsers via hyperlink and
vice versa).
> > 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.
I suspect Apple will use the multi-track features to do subtitles and
multiple languages when the iTunes movie store goes international. This
is, again, fairly trivial usage; it's a packaging convenience, not the
interactive media revolution we've been hearing about for probably 20
years now.
We occasionally hear some implausible idea, like having hyperlinks in
movies that people can click to buy placed products, but... who's really
going to pause a movie to click on a character's shoes? This is going to
be another one of those things that gets hyped for a couple of years and
then goes away.
> > 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.
Yes, but a lot of this stuff is actually moving to JavaScript, which is
much more of a "native" web technology, and will probably end up on SVG
in a few years.
Meanwhile, YouTube built a business that Google just paid $1.65B, using
Flash to deliver what (though YouTube does make some minor use of its
interactivity features) basically amounts to plain old non-interactive
video.
> 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.
Err? I've never heard of anything like that.
> > 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.)
--
"Those who enter the country illegally violate the law."
-- George W. Bush in Tucson, Ariz., Nov. 28, 2005
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