A BIGGER THAN EXPECTED DOWNLOAD
This distinction between being a system multimedia architecture rather than a web multimedia architecture was brought home to me quite dramatically when I went to download the latest developer preview beta release of QuickTime 3. Because I've been focusing on The Video Web, I was thinking of typical downloads for plug-ins such as RealNetworks' RealPlayer which are roughly 1MB. I was surprised to discover that the current QuickTime 3 release was a comparitively massive 10MB download ‹ roughly ten times the size of a major plug-in. In fact, Apple's Senior QuickTime Product Manager, Mitchell Weinstock told me that because of additional codecs and other features that are still being added to QuickTime 3, this file size would increase before QuickTime 3's final release.

This is because QuickTime is much more than a browser plug-in. It's a system level extension. To use QuickTime 3, you not only need the browser plug-in and all of the necessary codecs, but you need the system software extensions (either Mac or Windows) that enable QuickTime's relatively comprehensive forms of multimedia system support. Fortunately, they all come in one piece of installer software, but this comprehensive feature set comes with an "installation price" (a larger download).

And, in monetary terms, Jobs also announced the first ever price for QuickTime. A new "Pro" version (although this name may change) will be sold for $29.95. Like RealPlayer Plus which sells for the same price, QuickTime 3 will provide a version that will save "bandwidth-impaired" users from the download while also offering some additional features (like cut and paste editing within MoviePlayer). Most Internet savvy users can be expected to find their way to the free version.

Alternately, as with past versions of QuickTime, video pros (like us) are as likely to install QuickTime 3 from a CD-ROM entertainment product or from a new video software application as we are to go through the trouble of downloading it from the web. These other "installation channels" are part of the reason that QuickTime has been able to become so popular on the Web. QuickTime can legitimately refer to itself as a standard, and its commitment to consistent multi-platform compatibility is likely to extend this franchise.

"CINEPAK IS OVER"
Jobs underscored the fact that QuickTime 3 is a major upgrade by announcing a revamped set of built-in codecs. Apparently, part of the team that brought this new set of compression/decompression tools together is the techno-minds at Terran Interactive, makers of the industry leading compression utility, Media Cleaner Pro. They've been promoting Sorenson Vision's video codec to me as an important low-bandwidth solution for many months, and they were clearly on the inside of these announcements with some of the most advanced tests of both Sorenson and the QDesign Music Codec.

I should also note that QuickTime 3 includes many more new features than I either have space or time to specify here. I'm particularly interested in QuickTime 3's ability to handle vector graphics, MIDI, large canvas movies that combine vectors, video and other media, and finally, QuickTime 3's ability to combine versions of the same video compressed at different data rates within the same clip. I'll write more about these other features in future Video Web columns.

For The Video Web, QuickTime's new Apple-Sorenson codec will be especially important at low data rates like those discussed above. However, it was also touted for the compression/decompression of higher quality video all the way up to DVD. In fact, in the demonstrations at MacWorld, clips at data rates as low as 100Kbytes/second looked amazingly clean. Likewise, QuickTime 3 will now offer QDesign's Music Codec for music with quite impressive quality even at low-data rates, and QUALCOMM's PureVoice codec for voice. Media especially designed for the web can also deliver a new spectrum of music quality because QuickTime 3 will include the full library of the Roland Sound Canvas MIDI samples for much richer online MIDI compositions at a fraction of the bandwidth of compressed audio. QuickTime 3 will also deliver Apple's implementation of the H.263 video conferencing standard.

Among these, for video producers, Sorenson is clearly the most significant. In fact, Jobs said that it will replace Cinepak, the current de facto multimedia video standard. In his keynote, Jobs also marked another compression milestone by demonstrating full-screen, 30 fps, software-only video playback. Although I found out later that this demo was pixel-doubled (i.e. the source movie was 320 x 240 pixels, rather than 640 x 480 or larger), the images were impressively clean and showed surprisingly few artifacts.

Apple's Weinstock also pointed out that there would be exceptions to Sorenson replacing Cinepak. Examples include situations where there's a concern for lower performing CPU's (for playback, Sorenson is reportedly more CPU intensive than Cinepak, but less CPU intensive than RealVideo) or for situations where backward compatibility with earlier versions of QuickTime is desired. Clips encoded with Sorenson will require QuickTime 3 for playback.

For dial-up bandwidths, most of the clips that were shown around MacWorld were using fewer frames per second than most Internet video in order to get better quality frames. In most cases these clips had only 2 - 3 frames per second. While this is an interesting choice and not necessarily a bad one when compared to better frame rates that result in much worse looking video, it underscores the challenge of getting anything of reasonable quality through the extremely small bandwidths afforded by dial-up connections.

SLOWER TO ENCODE THAN CINEPAK
Another substantial difference between QuickTime's approach to the Video Web and those of more conventional streamers like Real Media and NetShow is the complexity of the Sorenson codec. The price that producers pay for the impressive quality that Sorenson delivers is the time that it takes to encode or compress clips. Most streamers, on the other hand, compress their clips more quickly even if the quality is a bit less. In fact, as I mentioned, streamers RealVideo and NetShow offer live video streaming which means that they include the option of compressing video in real time. No such streaming option is available from QuickTime (at least, not yet, but there were rumors.)

To be more specific, I used the codec experts at Terran Interactive (whose educational web site, Codec Central at http://www.codeccentral.com, is a great source of more information on this subject) to help me evaluate the time required to compress video using Sorenson. At press time, Terran's VP Marketing, John Geyer said that their tests show that Sorenson compression on the Mac was running about 40% slower than Cinepak compression (which is no speed demon.) Geyer told me that a sample 10-second video clip that took 2 minutes and 22 seconds to compress with Cinepak, took 3 minutes and 38 seconds to compress with the current version of Sorenson on a Mac 8100. Ray Brooksby, VP Sales & Marketing for Sorenson Vision also acknowledged the "encode issue" to me and said they are "working on it." While Sorenson's compression times are certain to improve before QuickTime 3 ships, clearly the time required to compress with Sorenson will remain a far cry from real time or anything even in that ball park.

On the other hand, the never-ending acceleration of CPU speeds is certain to further help reduce compression times, and I'm pleased that Apple has found a new vendor (Sorenson) that has helped to create a viable alternative to Cinepak (which has not been upgraded in years).

BOTTOM LINE
The bottom line is that we live in a world of more and more choices. And, like it or not, that trend will inevitably continue. I think Darren Giles, Technical Director at Terran Interactive summed it up for me best when he said that "there is no one best solution." Choosing the right Video Web "architecture" depends on an array of variables including the nature of your material, the quantity of video you want to publish, your audience and their bandwidth, and more.

When QuickTime 3 ships, it will be entering this market with an interesting new Video Web alternative; however, in my humble opinion, it is an alternative for real time delivery (in some cases), but not streaming (in the technically correct use of this term). More importantly, some producers and some situations will be better served by QuickTime's approach, while others will need the live, multicast and quicker encoding times that are offered by true streaming.

I wish I could tell you that The Video Web is getting simpler, but I can not. However, what is encouraging to online video producers is that, not only is compression getting better and better, but with the continuing growth of cable modems and the likely emergence of a DSL standard, the size of the audience of users with high bandwidth connections is certain to grow rapidly over the next couple of years. And that last development, more than anything, spells the emergence of another whole new online video world.

So, stay tuned.

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