[WEB4LIB] Re: [Formats for audio/video in electronic theses]

[Mark Jordan]

On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Leo Robert Klein wrote:

>
> Had you saved the file in Quicktime five years ago, you still would have
> been able to use it today -- on both a Mac and a PC.  Wasn't that the spec?
>

You are right, but I was even more sceptical of QuickTime five years ago
than I am today, because it was less cross-platform then. Hindsight, etc.

> I wouldn't be too ready to dismiss a format as pariah simply because it is
> proprietary -- not in DV and not if it had a long tradition of working best
> in some of the most common DV applications including Adobe Premiere or
> AfterEffects -- i.e. things your own students are likely to get their hands
> on.  If you dismiss it out of hand, you risk placing yourself at the mercy
> of formats that may not be as well supported either back-end or front-end.
>

That's the gamble - place yourself at the mercy of a common, usable format
now that may or may not be around down the road or at the mercy of a
format that is difficult to work with but that isn't owned by a single
company and is at least documented in a public specification.

> FWIW, Quicktime was accepted as the basis of MPEG4 almost two years ago.  See:
>     http://www.apple.com/pr/library/1998/feb/11iso.html
>

Thank you for the citation. But even if QuickTime is the basis of MPEG4,
then I would not count on QuickTime (or derivative versions that comes out
of the six companies that submitted the proposal) remaining compatible
with MPEG4 after ISO further develops and codifies the standard. If the
companies claimed that a later version of QuickTime was MPEG4 compliant, I
would have to accept that, but being the basis for standard and complying
with the standard at a later date aren't the same thing.

Vendors coming together to agree on a "standard" means little when all we
have to do is remember how Microsoft and Netscape agreed on various
versions of HTML while at the same time extending the standards in their
products.

Mark



Mark Jordan
Librarian / Analyst, Systems Division
W.A.C. Bennett Library, Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 1S6, Canada
Phone (604) 291 5753 / Fax (604) 291 3023
mjordan at sfu.ca / http://www.sfu.ca/~mjordan/