Skip to main content

Notice

Please note that most of the software linked on this forum is likely to be safe to use. If you are unsure, feel free to ask in the relevant topics, or send a private message to an administrator or moderator. To help curb the problems of false positives, or in the event that you do find actual malware, you can contribute through the article linked here.
Topic: Why isn't .mov used more as a container? (Read 18586 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Why isn't .mov used more as a container?

Reply #25
Quote
I honestly have no idea that there actually IS such as an Quicktime API, and i dont know of any codecs that have implemented it, do you ?

This is the QTFF (QuickTime File Format) specification and API.
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/q...QTFF/index.html

As you can see, it's very complete and all details about how codecs are identified and handled are present there. Specifically:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/q...hap3/index.html

And I know of several codecs that were implemented in QuickTime without Apple's "seal of approval": Vorbis, Speex, MNG, AC3, maybe 3ivX (although I'm not sure on that one)

Why isn't .mov used more as a container?

Reply #26
Quote
And I know of several codecs that were implemented in QuickTime without Apple's "seal of approval": Vorbis, Speex, MNG, AC3, maybe 3ivX (although I'm not sure on that one)

To come back to the original topic, why istn MOV used more if its so good, has an open and well documented API, and is a widely adopted standard ?

I dont think this thread should evolve into a '... why did the matroska devs make their own container instead of using MOV ...' thread .....

Why isn't .mov used more as a container?

Reply #27
Quote
To come back to the original topic, why istn MOV used more if its so good, has an open and well documented API, and is a widely adopted standard ?

"Why isn't Mac used more than PC, if it has superior hardware and the OS is more stable than PC's "standard" OS?"

"Why isn't Linux used more than Windows if it is more stable and secure?"

"Why aren't AAC and Vorbis used more than MP3, since they are better in all aspects?"

We could go on forever here...

But really, I would pinpoint it to the facts that AVI is the official container format for Windows, and Mov is the official container format for MacOS. And windows dominates the market. You can play AVI out-of-the-box on windows, but you can't play MOV without downloading QuickTime. DivX ;-), that really popularized AVI creation in windows, was only released as a VCM for the windows platform, no QuickTime component. And so on...

 

Why isn't .mov used more as a container?

Reply #28
Quote
Argument ? Why should i see the necessity to defend ourselves for what we did ? I dont need no arguments. If people like to use our container, they do so, if they like to use MOV they can do that also. Its as simple as that.

Maybe I was a bit too aggressive in my wording. What I meant was considering you already have created your file format, finding a reason for people to choose it over MOV will be difficult. If people are happy with MOV, Matroska won't offer them all that much new. I'd like to say the opposite is true as well, but after all, support for Matroska isn't widespread - especially not on macs.

The two formats seem very similar; the differences between EBML and atoms seem to be technicalities anyway - whether you use a UTF-8 character or a 32-bit integer to identify an element.

Quote
To come back to the original topic, why istn MOV used more if its so good, has an open and well documented API, and is a widely adopted standard ?

I believe the reason why MOV hasn't been used widely is that up to recently, there were not many other ways to create one other than using QuickTime. 3ivx D4 introduced a splitter for some Windows API - I think it's DirectShow - but it had synchronisation issues when decoding. They should be fixed with their D4.5 release on Tuesday. FFmpeg only recently added a MOV muxer to it's impressive array of supported file formats. I think the QuickTime file formats will see much wider support in the future. What makes AVI so unique is that every decent player has an implementation of it - it seems MOV is moving slowly, but steadily, in that direction.