My Apple Quicktime3 opinions

Jan. 18/99

I think Quicktime3 by Apple is a nice compilation of a large assortment of formats, codecs & utilities, but it has some serious bugs & lots of things it doesn't do or have yet. I was given a CD with Quicktime3 (player) on it by Apple at last years NAB convention (April 98). I paid the $29.99 to turn it into the Pro version (which exports or encodes). Later in the spring I documented all the bugs I found & the guy I dealt with at Apple was in complete denial of the problems or didn't want to hear about them. I had confirmed the problems on 3 separate PC systems & 1 Mac system.

The updated current Quicktime3 Pro version still doesn't have any documentation or help files, can't play Indeo 3.2 AVIs (Quicktime4 can), can't play MPEG1 (on the PC version) (Windows Media Player version 6 can play Indeo 3.2 & MPEG1), has some mislabeled & very nonintuitive areas, screws up the colors of Indeo 4.2 AVIs when exporting them to Sorenson, sometimes causes echoes (a phasing or hollow sound) in the audio when compressing using the QDesign music codec, takes a very long time to render, the render meter isn't very accurate, it requires considerable CPU power to play most newer codecs back without skipping, it doesn't remember your last export settings, gamma or black level settings are wrong (causing slight crushing or darkening of the detail in black areas), etc. etc. etc. Other than that, Quicktime3 works great. I really thought Apple was going to go somewhere with this neat little utility (& they still might), but so far it's like a beta version as far as I'm concerned. Quicktime3 Pro is a lot better player (decoder) than it is a recorder (encoder or exporter).

There is also an intermittent bug in Quicktime3 Pro (on Macs & PCs) when exporting to a Cinepak movie (perhaps other codecs too), where the very last frame flashes white. The workaround for this is to open the Cinepak Quicktime3 mov, play it to the last frame which is white, press & hold the Shift key, use the back arrow in the lower right corner of the player to back it up 1 or 2 frames, hit the delete key & save the edited clip over itself.

The export Cinepak codec installed in Quicktime3 Pro is the old one which has a bug that sometimes causes objectionable pixel blocks in areas where there is only subtle gradation, when using the codec near 100%. The newer Windows Cinepak codec (version 1.10.0.26) available for free at http://www.cinepak.com/begin.html won't help fix this problem in Quicktime3 Pro until Apple incorporates this newer version in Quicktime3 Pro. Interestingly, I found the older Cinepak codec in Quicktime3 Pro to give a slightly better, less posterized picture at full data rates at 640X480X15 (looks less grainy too), than the newer Windows version of Cinepak.

I have started beta testing on the PC version of Media Cleaner Pro 4.0 by Terran Communications. This software offers professional producers much better Quicktime3 encoding performance than the basic Apple version of Quicktime3 Pro. I suspect that most of the encoding (exporting) bugs mentioned above for the inexpensive Apple Quicktime3 Pro, are likely addressed in Media Cleaner Pro. Perhaps if Apple continues to improve the free Quicktime3 player available at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/  & with the help of professional products like Media Cleaner Pro, Apple's Quicktime3 can still gain good market share as a player.

UPDATE APRIL 19/99 BETA VERSION OF QUICKTIME4

Today Apple released it's beta version of Quicktime4 & the full (finished) release is scheduled for June. I do not recommend upgrading from Quicktime3 to the beta version of Quicktime4 at this time. I tried it & it causes Media Cleaner Pro on the PC to crash. I had to do a COMPLETE uninstalled of QuickTime4 & reinstall QuickTime3. When uninstalling QuickTime4 you MUST click on "UNINSTALL EVERYTHING" as the basic uninstall does not remove all the offending files. As far as I'm concerned, the PC beta version of QuickTime4 really sucks. Not only does it crash Media Cleaner Pro, but Cinepak AVI movies that played fine in Quicktime3, drop frames while playing in Quicktime4.

UPDATE MAY 2000 QUICKTIME4

I have recently discovered that all PC versions of the QuickTime player are extremely CPU intensive compared to the RealMedia Player7 or the Windows Media Player. If you take a Cinepak or Indeo 3.2 AVI file & measure the CPU usage while playing this movie in the QuickTime player, then play the same movie in Windows Media Player or the RealMedia player, you'll see what a CPU pig the QuickTime player is. This can have a dramatic difference in playability on older computers. For this reason, I would recommend against using the QuickTime format player for simple internet videos.

UPDATE MARCH 21/99 ON THE STAR WARS TRAILERS

The Star Wars trailer "The Phantom Menace" from Lucasfilm was prepared for Quicktime3 internet delivery by Doug Werner of Apple using Media Cleaner Pro & the "Developers Edition" of the Sorenson codec.

The largest version is 480X214 resolution at 24 frames per second using audio at 22kHz, 16 bit, stereo (IMA 4:1 compression). The zipped file size download is 25,132,198 bytes (23.9 MB) which is quite large. In theory it could be downloaded via a 56.6 modem in 59:12 minutes or a cable modem in 1:07 minutes, but in practice it usually takes a lot longer because of server bottlenecks & other server hops. I was able to download it via cable modem 11:30pm Friday in 3:14 minutes which works out to 129,547 bytes/second (126.5 kilobytes/second or 1012 kilobits/second) (not bad).

Clearly Apple has some big honking servers to be able to deliver this quickly during peak time to so many people at once, though not quite fast enough to deliver in real-time via cable modem. The effort that Apple has put into servers for these trailers, tells me that Apple really wants to push the Quicktime format as the format of choice for internet downloads, so this could mark a renewed effort to push Quicktime. Apple's very existence could depend on how successful they are with the Quicktime codecs.

Since Apple introduced Quicktime3 about this time last year, I have not been especially impressed with it's performance. As an example of my lack of enthusiasm for Quicktime3, this 480X216 file (The Phantom Menace) would not play without extremely serious frame skipping on a Pentium 133. The movie was 2:29 minutes & the data size was 26,031,487 bytes (24.8 MB) so that works out to an average of 174,707 bytes/second (170.6 KB/sec). That's very close to the data rate of CD audio (which is 176.6 KB/sec), so delivery of a contiguous stream of data at a low rate like that shouldn't be a problem for any CD player or hard drive. My hard drive was a SCSI AV & not fragmented so the skipping problem means that the Sorenson codec used for video & the QuickTime player, require way too much CPU processing power to be able to play this file back on anything but a newer computer with more CPU power. In my opinion, this & most other new video codecs, sacrifice proper playing on older computers in order to achieve a small data size (though the QuickTime player uses more CPU power). A Pentium 133 should be able to play this movie back properly, but it cannot (not even close to satisfactory).

Next I tried the 320X144 resolution file on the Pentium 133. It has the same frame rate of 24 per second & the same audio quality as the larger version, but the resolution area is 44.4% of the larger version (data size about 50%). This file played perfectly on a Pentium 133, in normal size mode & only had slight frame skipping problems in full screen mode.

Next I tried playing the larger 480X216 version on a Pentium II at 233 MHz & it played fine in normal size, but there were some skipped frames & voided audio when I played it in double size mode because the CPU was having to work harder to scale it. It's too bad Apple doesn't give some suggested minimum CPU requirements for these files.

By Doug Hembruff.
Last updated July 1/2000