2 Responses

  1. Daniel
    Daniel October 22, 2010 at 7:14 am |

    I really like these stories, and these opinions. This is why I visit your site, even though new posts appear infrequently enough for me to check the feeds about once a week.

    You’re absolutely right about Steve Jobs always saying that there is no market for something, before releasing a product that does just that. Didn’t he previously say “people don’t read”? And, here we have an iPad.

    I’ve always hated Quicktime, and I”ll be the first one to say that. In 1998, it was only slightly better than RealPlayer. And it’s still terrible. Why can VLC open a video in 2 seconds, and Quicktime takes 15 seconds to open the same video?

    I agree with you about how scared Apple is of Google. However, I have to say, almost everything Google creates is free, or close to it. Sure, you give up some privacy. But for the long haul, I’m willing to do that to save money. Hey, at least it’s not Facebook.

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  2. Christopher Price
    Christopher Price October 22, 2010 at 10:56 am |

    Apple certainly doesn’t think of VLC as a bad product, in fact VLC was given an Apple Design Award, their highest honor to a third-party developer.

    The reason that QuickTime is slower on Windows is primarily because it was designed for Mac. Plus, being one of the first video players ever, it is well over a decade old. To maintain compatibility, that means code that was written 10 years ago still has to linger around.

    Don’t forget, QuickTime was used as the basis for MPEG-4, Apple has a duty to the format makers to not be the fastest, but the most reliable of the codec developers.

    The main improvements today to QuickTime for Windows are to aid iTunes, as such, under the hood code that accelerates iTunes gets first priority. Still, Apple is keenly aware that QuickTime 7 is archaic in many respects.

    QuickTime X on the Mac was introduced with little fanfare externally, but represents a complete re-write of the QuickTime code. Eventually, that code will likely be re-ported to Windows and replace the existing QuickTime 7 code base in apps like iTunes. That version will likely take advantage of hardware accleration and other modern features that products like VLC can use on Windows.

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