MPEG-4 Licensing

This CNet article indicates that the MPEG-4 Licensing terms are still under negotiation. Quotes from both Steve Jobs and the vice president of the MPEG LA indicate that they believe that the terms will be worked out by Quicktime 6's official release:

"The licensing stuff is getting worked out," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in an interview Tuesday. Every 'i' is not dotted and every 't' is not crossed, but it's getting there. I have a lot of confidence it will. This is too important not to get worked out."

and

"We don't have any new information on the licensing, and we hope that we'll have final terms sometime this summer," said Larry Horn, vice president of licensing and business development for MPEG LA. "That being said, Apple's announcement shows great confidence that a reasonable license from all the various patent holders will be available."

Clearly all the issues have not quite been resolved. I wonder what sort of agreement had to be made to get the go-ahead for the public release of quicktime 6? You can encode in MPEG-4 with this release, so some sort of arrangement must have been reached. Perhaps that's why the MPEG-4 encoding isn't very good quality in this release?

Originally posted by britboy
Perhaps that's why the MPEG-4 encoding isn't very good quality in this release?

no... there's no reason they would "hold back" on the encoding quality.

arn

but this does play a big part as to why we won't see the final release of Quicktime 6?

Originally posted by arn


no... there's no reason they would "hold back" on the encoding quality.

arn

So the encoding abilities with QT 6 will just not be all that good then? I understood mp4 was going to 'replace' divx for the quality/size ratio.

Originally posted by britboy

So the encoding abilities with QT 6 will just not be all that good then? I understood mp4 was going to 'replace' divx for the quality/size ratio.

what makes you say it's not very good? I haven't tried it and/or compared the two.

Of note, Divx is based on mpeg-4 and the newest version in fact can create mpeg-4 compliant video.

arn

Originally posted by arn


what makes you say it's not very good? I haven't tried it and/or compared the two.

I've exported some footage i shot with my digital camcorder from iMovie, using the full quality option. The .mov file was great quality. In quicktime i then exported it as a .mp4 file (the .mov was 1.5GB, and i kind of wanted to burn it to CD). I set everything to as high a quality as possible, but even then i was getting a lower resolution than the .mov file.

Granted, it was reduced to 140MB, but i want the quality to remain high.

Originally posted by britboy


I've exported some footage i shot with my digital camcorder from iMovie, using the full quality option. The .mov file was great quality. In quicktime i then exported it as a .mp4 file (the .mov was 1.5GB, and i kind of wanted to burn it to CD). I set everything to as high a quality as possible, but even then i was getting a lower resolution than the .mov file.

Granted, it was reduced to 140MB, but i want the quality to remain high.

:) Clearly, that's not the most scientific comparison... I haven't played around with the settings... presumably, you can tweak the bitrates... but you'll have to ask around or experiment. The Preview may be limited in it's options...

arn

britboy,

see

http://www.apple.com/quicktime/preview/mpeg4_gallery/

for examples of mpeg-4 video

arn

Originally posted by arn


:) Clearly, that's not the most scientific comparison... I haven't played around with the settings... presumably, you can tweak the bitrates... but you'll have to ask around or experiment. The Preview may be limited in it's options...

arn

Clearly :) It's based on my personal experience, which, to say the least, is rather limited at the moment. But it does make me believe that the quicktime preview doesn't offer the same quality as we can hopefully expect from the full release, due to continued wranglings with the licensing.