QT3's crippled MoviePlayer makes this 6MB download a dubious upgrade, but the new features provide improvement for Macs and Windows PCs - albeit with some caveats.
QuickTime 3 for the Macintosh and 32-bit Windows PCs is now available in freely downloadable and US$29.95 "Pro" formats from Apple's QuickTime website. It brings feature parity and the authoring APIs of Apple's multimedia environment to the PC for the first time. The "QuickTime 3 Pro" version on sale from Apple's website provides an easy to use (i.e., limited) video editor and additional authoring and playback features (described at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/upgrade/), including several that were previously part of the freeware version such as looping and full-screen playback. Mac downloaders may miss additional options the previous Windows versions of QuickTime never had, such as the now "Pro-only" Save Movie feature. Indeed, as a growing number of Mac websites are complaining, Apple has basically crippled its freeware version of MoviePlayer and is making you pay for functionality that the old version provided for free (and still does, if you saved a copy).
Fortunately, there are some very cool features in the new release that will help the complainers to get over the snags -- well, maybe. Read on....
QuickTime 3 introduces limited streaming capabilities (limited in the sense that, although it includes streaming support for audio, video and VR panoramas, the files end up on the client machine. "True" streaming with support for RTP real-time protocol will be provided by an updated version that was at one time expected to appear with the release of Mac OS 8.5 in Q3'98, but has, as of Apr. '99, still not been formally announced and is now expected to be a key feature of QuickTime 4. However, even as far back as the Macworld Expo keynote in Jan. 1998, Steve Jobs characterized RealNetworks' RealVideo/RealAudio streaming technologies as QuickTime's major competitor. (Some sources say the demonstration Jobs staged at the 1999 Macworld keynote, in which video was streamed to fifty iMacs was accomplished with the unannounced QuickTime 4.)
QuickTime 3 provides both Macs and Windows systems with direct support for digital video format files -- the data that comes out of a FireWire jack. (QuickTime also provides support for the not-especially useful MacPaint format and gives Windows users access to the originally Mac-only PICT format.)
Because digital audio and -- especially -- video files can be very large (3.5MB per sec. for the digital video format), Apple has licensed some new and improved codecs to better handle high-quality movies and sound. For audio playback, Apple licensed music technology from QDesign and Roland's Sound Canvas synthesizer sound library and General MIDI extensions for QuickTime 3. However, we compared Apple's software wavetable synthesis with that of Roland's Virtual Sound Canvas VSC-55 for Windows and Yamaha's SYG20 SoftSynth and Apple's was by far the worst sounding of the three. But it's better than no soft synth at all. You'll still need a third-party player such as the excellent MacAmp or WinAmp for Mac or Windows, respectively, to listen to MP3 audio files.
For video, Apple worked with a company called Sorenson to come up with the Apple-Sorenson Codec, a successor to the venerable Cinepak codec. With minimal visual degradation, the Sorenson codec reduced this movie (a file created with the ElectricImage Animation system on a Mac) to 27K -- less than one-tenth the size of the original 284K file as saved by Microsoft's Video codec.
At the QuickTime 3 introduction, Apple showed a full-screen movie playing with excellent quality images and sound, requiring only 60K per second of bandwidth. (Note, however, that the freeware version of QT3 is incapable of full-screen mode.) Apple says QuickTime 3.0's advanced compression capabilities will be the basis of a forthcoming compression standard dubbed MPEG-4.
In addition, Apple licensed Qualcomm's PureVoice -- a high quality codec optimized for voice, which is also built into many PCS digital phones. QT3 also supports the popular videoconferencing standard H.263. Best of all, QuickTime streams without requiring a special proprietary server (another poke at RealNetworks). A QT file runs off any HTTP server anytime you want to stream it.
Other notable QT3 Pro features are the new translators it provides to import AVI files and save movies in DVC (digital video camera) format. A full description of its capabilities is at http://www.quicktime.apple.com/qt30/whitepaper/
In addition to AVI import, QuickTime 3 supports the playback of AVI movies (this is particularly useful on the Mac, which does not otherwise have this capability without third party translators), however many AVIs (typically, those created on a PC using recent Indeo codecs) display only a white screen on a Mac with the version of MoviePlayer that ships with QuickTime 3.0. Intel's Indeo website confirms that Indeo 5 is not supported on the Mac. There is no solution to this issue, other than to convert the file on a PC to a format the Mac can read. For older Indeo releases and other popular codecs, however, you can get the codecs by installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.5 and the new Indeo Video 4.4 codec for QuickTime 3 Pro, which is now available for downloading from the QuickTime web site. With these updates, you get the necessary system extensions that allow some Indeo-format movies to play as expected.
QuickTime's architecture is extensible, as Apple showed a few years ago when it transparently added PhotoCD support to the MacOS via a little QuickTime magic. Astarte MPEG exporter is a third-party extension to Apple's QuickTime architecture for Macintosh that adds MPEG export to any program that uses QuickTime's standard export function, such as the Pro version of MoviePlayer. A demo version for PPC Macs is currently downloadable for free from www.mac-shop.com.
Apple's Windows implementation of Resource forks is a little peculiar. When QuickTime makes a preview of, say, a JPEG file, it creates a #RES file wherever the original file happened to be. Thus, your PC soon becomes littered with these files and gives Windows users twice as many opportunities to break file links. Windows 95/NT with IE4, or Windows 98, by comparison, transparently make previews of JPEG, GIF, HTML, DOC and other file types in any window you choose without leaving droppings all over the place.
Like version 2.5 on the Mac, the new QuickTime for Mac can import a text file and turn it into a movie, with smooth anti-aliased text. However, if the Windows version can do this, we couldn't figure out how. (The information posted at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/authors/texttrak.html doesn't work with the Windows version.) It barfed with a "Not a Movie file" error message when we fed it a text file. An Apple conspiracy to get Windows users more fond of Macs?
We had better luck importing a MIDI file (but the cool feature that allows you to import text as Karaoke lyrics isn't enabled in the freeware version). Nor would 3.0 allow us to change our MIDI file's instrumentation -- yet another feature that was previously possible in v2.5 and is now missing entirely from the freeware version of 3.0. Perhaps the coolest new feature freeware users will never see, though, is found in the Pro version's MoviePlayer Save dialog. Here, you can apply animated filter effects such as film grain (complete with animated dust and scratches, although the scratches are annoyingly fake looking), emboss, edge detection and many other effects. (More info.)
Users of the free (or Pro) release can use Apple's free MakeEffectMovie utility (makeeffectmovie.zip for Windows or makeeffectmovie.sea.hqx for Mac) to create some cool effects, such as realistic fire, clouds, and animated displacement maps. The animated fire effect, in particular, looks great.
But keep a copy of your old MoviePlayer or be prepared to pay US$30 to see what this upgrade can really do. (The $30 buys you a serial number to enter into the QT3 control panel's registration dialog.) Apple's website has full documentation for MoviePlayer 3.0 that reveals which features are missing from the freeware release.
Like the version 2.5 supplied with Mac OS 8, QuickTime 3 supports MPEG-1 (this feature is not supported on 68K-based Macs), allowing QuickTime enabled computers to play back video CDs and downloaded MPEG-1 movies. Ironically, this is the first version that brings feature parity to the Windows version, but Mac users benefit more from the ability to finally import AVI, WAV, TIFF, Targa and BMP files into standard QuickTime apps. Flic files are also supported.
Our initial tests of QuickTime 3 on a Mac revealed no compatibility problems with leading applications such as Adobe Premiere or After Effects, but further exploration revealed that Premiere 4.2 could not exploit its AVI import feature. This was easily fixed, however. We simply opened the AVI in an old version of Apple's MoviePlayer and saved the file in MOV format to work around this issue.
Although the freeware version of QT3 can't save files, the web browser plug-in can. You can simply alt-click (option-click on a Mac) QT movies from within your web browser to save them.
Things weren't as smooth when we tested Premiere for Windows. Disturbingly, QT3 didn't work with the Premiere.4.2 -- and Premiere 5.0 didn't work with QuickTime 2.12, either! (Adobe ships Premiere 5.0 with QT3.) And is it worth mentioning that Premiere 4.2, running the old 2.12 version of QuickTime, couldn't import a QT3 movie either or that, inexplicably, the PICT file included with QT3 can't be opened by computers running older versions of QT? Worse, we couldn't even open these PICT files on a computer running Photoshop 4.01 and QT3 to convert them to a version our QuickTime 2.5-using cohorts could read. Yikes.
In further tests on our Windows system, we discovered that Ulead's MediaStudio Pro 5.0, too, was unable to import QuickTime movies with QT3 installed, complaining that QuickTime could not be initialized correctly. However, an update on the Ulead website fixes this problem.
Some Windows applications will not work with QuickTime 3,0, but may work if version 2.1 is installed alongside it. For example, the troubleshooting notes for Peter Gabriel's "Eve"" CD say, "QuickTime 2.1 for Windows must be installed even if you have QuickTime 3. QuickTime 2.1 and 3 will run side by side and should not cause any problems"
On one of our Windows 95 test machines, we were unable to run the Setup program from the Desktop directory (it complained, "can't decompress %s - not enough TEMP space on drive..." -- a bogus message, considering the hundreds of megabytes of free disk space we had on our system). We worked around this minor bug by moving the executable to our C drive's root directory, where the installer worked as expected. Under Windows 98, the installer worked normally from any directory we tried.
Performance of MoviePlayer and the loading speed of our web browsers declined after installing QT3, however. After installing, IE 4.01 and Communicator 4.0x started loading very slowly, presumably due to the new QuickTime plug-ins provided.
Back on the Mac, we discovered that neither Premiere 4.2 nor 5.0 were able to load certain MOV files, such as the "Get QuickTime Pro" advertisement that is installed with QT3. Additionally, MacFixit reports that some Photoshop users have suffered frequent crashes after upgrading.
The most obnoxious feature of the initial release of QT3, however, was the fact that one of Apple's licensing options allowed developers to avoid a hefty $1 per copy licensing fee by including what Ric Ford of www.macintouch.com calls "a virus-like, continual recreation of an unwanted file on every user's desktop." Nice.
Incidentally, setting your system clock a few years into the future before clicking the "Later" button makes this message go away until then.
Apple's original QT3 license agreement had another unfortunate aspect, too. Developers weren't allowed to ship old versions of QuickTime anymore. In fact, Apple received such overwhelmingly negative feedback on these "features" that it announced a revised licensing agreement at the WWDC conference in May 1998, in which these issues were addressed. Macintouch has details at www.macintouch.com/qt3newlic.html
We'd urge caution with this upgrade, especially if you use an older program that may have problems with version 3 of QuickTime.
For Further Reading:
Other Graphics Engine Updates of Note:
OpenGL
For: multiple platforms (Windows, Unix, Mac, etc.)
OpenGL is a platform-independent graphics language by SGI, designed for quick two- and three-dimensional shaded rendering. OpenGL is used by many 3D graphics programs, on PCs, Macs, Unix workstations and other systems, to perform real-time shaded previews. OpenGL support is built into Windows NT and Windows 95 OSR2 and later releases, although SGI's implementation of the language offers higher performance than Microsoft's.
OpenGL rendering engines can be software-based, but performance increases greatly when OpenGL is running on a hardware accelerator, such as a 3D graphics card with OpenGL drivers. Note, however, these drivers may or may not provide full support for all the capabilities of the language. Some drivers are oriented toward game support (these are known as "mini" or "miniGL" drivers), for products such as GLQuake or Quake II. Other drivers, such as those for the Permedia2 graphics cards, offer complete support for the full range of OpenGL features. Some companies (such as ATI, for its "Rage Pro" series of cards) are developing full "ICD" (Installable client driver) GL drivers, but currently offer only beta versions or partial implementations.
Some companies, such as SGI's Cosmo VRML division, have eschewed QuickDraw 3D in their 3D products in favor of OpenGL on both the Mac and Windows. Apple, in Jan. '99, formally announced its intention to support OpenGL in a future version of the Mac OS, although it has so far declined to speculate on a time frame or the future (?) of its current QuickDraw 3D framework.
At the March 1998 WinHEC conference, SGI announced Version 1.2 of OpenGL. The new version is said to enable faster Windows performance by natively supporting Windows pixel formats. Unfortunately, SGI has pulled the 1.1 Windows version of OpenGL from its website and now points users to Microsoft's site instead. Presumably, this will change when the 1.2 release is ready.
See the 3D Graphics Gems article for more info on OpenGL acceleration and recommended hardware and software, or refer to:
http://rendition.dimension3d.com/technophobia/3D_101/apis.html
We recommend graphics cards based on the Permedia 2 or TNT chipsets as the best value in OpenGL accelerators. See the 3D Video Cards Buyer's Guide Report or visit PCbuyersguide.com for more info.
DirectX (see how DirectX works for background info)
For: Win95, Win98, NT4, Window 2000.
Drawing heavily from ideas pioneered by Apple's QuickTime, Microsoft's DirectX 5.0 includes a number of "APIs" (application programming interfaces) that allow programmers to more easily add features like 3D spatialized sound, hardware or software-based 3D acceleration and other services to 32-bit Windows programs. Direct3D, for example, allows programs such as games or 3D viewers to use a standard set of 3D function calls to ease the complex task of programming 3D graphics. DirectInput does the same thing for input devices like analog or digital joysticks or gamepads. DirectShow (formerly known as ActiveMovie) and DirectSound perform similar tasks for video and audio, respectively. DirectX 5.0 is available on many game CDs, and is available for free download from http://www.microsoft.com/directx/.
Note that Windows NT 4.0 needs Service Pack 3 or later to take advantage of some DirectX features. See the 3D Graphics Gems article and the 3D Video Cards ProductWatch report for more info on DirectX acceleration and performance issues.
Although Windows 98 shipped with DirectX 5, DirectX 6.1 is now available for that OS in final form, as well as a Windows 95 version released in August 1998. Among other new features, DirectX 6.x includes bump-mapping technology from TriTech Microelectronics and interactive music and downloadable sound sets via DirectMusic. Although DirectX 6.1 is officially only for Windows 95/98, some testers report that it can also be coerced to install under Windows NT 4.0, with some limitations. (Standard disclaimers apply.)
For further reading on what's new in DirectX 6.x, see the article titled "Playtime: Microsoft's new DirectX aids gamers" or the article at http://www.gamecenter.com/News/Item/0,3,1682,00.html
DirectX 7.0 and 8.0 (preliminary specs) are discussed at:
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