Why Quicktime? It's poisoned apple...

Hello

Can someone tell me why SL does use Quicktime? It's one of the worst players u can get. It's slow, it's crashing and it plays only few 'homepade' formats and not common aviable like xvid or divx. Stand alone player is a joke and Linden decided to use it... WHY?

What i see now all ppl play movie trailer, no wonder there not much more aviable. No wonder since there bad codec support and convert it it's a pain. We can't use many free aviable tv's stations either because Quicktime don't support them.

If i look VLC, dixv web player I'm getting jealous how easy it could be and they support all OS's.

There any reasons why Linden use it? It's a most INCOMPATIBLE player I know with worst usability too. I can only imagine Linden get paid for add this player or they got some iPod's for free. They can enjoy nice music while we enjoy... what? Ohh yes - exiting movie trailers...

I can think of 2 reasons, It's supported on every major O/S, and the library is free.

I don't understand your statement about not being able to play 'free available tv stations'.. it does. Our equipment comes with a wide selection of free view TV stations.
Quicktime supports a wide range of codex, what you are probably confused with is 2 things.
1) The MOV format is a wrapper format that encompasses many types of codex.
2) The player has a few codex selected by default, but by 'checking' additional formats in its preferences, it will play other formats. This is true for all players.

To cover the widest range of audiences, most machinima creators use the default player codex, as most people either do not know how, or don't want to swap their other player for QuickTime, to play certain formats.

Bearing in mind that the default player for windows (mplayer) is not compatible with other OS's, whereas QuickTime is compatible with Windows and Mac, Lunix users have their own programmes that allow QuickTime compatible movie formats to be played within the SL clients pluggin.

You CAN play dixv media through the QuickTime pluggin, provided you have the codex installed on your system, and it is encompased with a MOV wrapper format. The MOV format is not a codex, it's a delivery format.

Imagine for a moment... the humble ZIP file. You have a word document, which has text, an embedded spreadsheet, fonts and a couple of jpgs and a gif. You compress that into a ZIP file. When sent via email and downloaded onto the recipients system and unzipped, it is still a word document with all elements intact.
Now swap the ZIP format for a Codex... and the Email for a MOV format.. and you have the principal.

If you do not have a programme that can decompress the ZIP file, then you cannot view its contents, it is the same with a codex.

Q: "Can someone tell me why SL does use Quicktime?"

A: The people who developed SL are the same people who developed Quicktime. (So I've heard.)

actually, phillip started ll/sl after being a part of the tech team over at realnetworks/realmedia/realplayer/realaudio/realburrito quicktime was chosen for sl for basically the previously-mentioned reasons.

I've been around video a bit. No expert here, but I'll tell you what I know. First off, while xvide and divx are very good video codec systems, they most certainly are not "standard". Quicktime has been around since the early 90s. It has wide-ranging support across Mac OS, Windows, and Linux. Not sure what you mean by "standalone" but while there is the QT player, it is also embedded into your browser if you have quicktime installed. QT has one of the highest install bases across the world after Flash and Windows Media Player.

Unfortunately, you are wrong on all counts.