On 3 Apr 2012, at 21:26, Rev Tony Newnham <revtonynewn...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> What about "Apple lossless compression", Quicktime - and so on? > >> Apple has no history of pushing proprietary file formats, except for DRM. Apple Lossless is fully published: http://alac.macosforge.org/ It's reason to exist is that Apple made an engineering choice: that less compute cycles during playback (i.e. battery life on portable devices) is more important than fast compression (which is done only once) or the ultimate in compression ratio (storage gets cheaper, but devices and batteries shrink, so battery life is always going to be a challenge). Again, it's FUD when people think Apple is needlessly proprietary. As a matter of fact, when it comes to standards Apple does more to push them than just about any other force in the market. Others push things like Flash, > Quicktime Quicktime was way ahead of its time and actually is the foundation of MPEG4, which has a container format directly based on Quicktime. With the arrival of MP4 Apple pretty much only uses that format, and retains the older versions only for backwards compatibility. All the stuff you find in the iTunes store are now MP4 based, i.e. m4v and m4a, whereby only the DRM is proprietary at the request of the content providers. The container format itself is open and anyone can create and read m4v/m4a files as long as they don't try to use the FairPlay DRM, which is kind of obvious, because if everyone could decode the DRM, there wouldn't be a need for DRM in the first place. > and so on? Can't answer that part of the question, because it's not specified in any meaningful way. Ronald _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
