QuickTime is ten years old this weekend! You can read more about QuickTime's history in Robert X. Cringely's "The Pulpit" column (scroll to the bottom of the page) and a brief article in AV Video/Multimedia Producer, "Friends of Time to Mark 10th Anniversary of QuickTime". Both refer to the Friends of Time organization we mentioned a few weeks ago.
Software updates:
SwingTime 2.02, a tool (for Mac and PC) that exports a series of images from a QuickTime VR panorama has been released. Go to the Empire Visualization web site where you'll find links to either purchase the software or download a demo version.
Diffusion 2.0, a free Mac Quicktime Effect plug-in that transforms your image to look like an impressionistic or pointillist painting, is available at the Buena Software Diffusion page.
MovieFloat 1.0.5, a Mac OS X program that plays QuickTime movies in a floating window, is available at the MovieFloat page.
If you've started to play with Textation (Mac OS X tool for creating text tracks), you may want to check out the tutorials (on creating chapter tracks and creating subtitle tracks) that have been posted at the Feelorium web site. (Scroll to the bottom of the page)
The 5.1 update for Cleaner (with support for Sorenson Pro 2-pass VBR) is finally available! Go to the Cleaner Update page.
You'll find another comparison of QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real in a streamingmedia.com article, "Quality Comparison: RealVideo, Windows Media Video and Sorenson Video".
Yesterday, Microsoft released Office v. X for Mac OS X. The QuickTime-related news is that the PowerPoint component of this suite includes improvements (from PowerPoint 2001) to its QuickTime export capabilities (which Microsoft refers to as "PowerPoint movies"). You can read a MacCentral article, "Hands on with Excel, PowerPoint and Word X" for more info, or go to Microsoft's What's New in PowerPoint X page.
JES Deinterlacer is a new Mac freeware utility you can use to deinterlace or reinterlace QuickTime movies. You'll find it at the Home page of Jan E.Schotsman.
Virtual Composer (a QuickTime music composition tool) has been updated to version 2.9.3. See the VersionTracker Virtual Composer More Info page.
A new version of Apple's free QTVR Make Cubic tool (for creating a cubic panorama movie from six faces of a cube or equirectangular images) is available at Apple's QuickTime Tools and Utilities page. This version will run on Mac OS X as well as Mac OS 9. (It's been there for at least a couple of weeks; we just missed it.)
Best Software Design has released Version1.0.1 of PolyPhontics, a tool for creating Sound Font 2 (SF2)and Downloadable Sounds (DLS) files. (QuickTime 5 supports these 2 formats as replacement sound banks for its built-in musical instruments.) See the VersionTracker PolyPhontics More Info page.
Totally Hip is offering a $900 OS X bundle, which includes three of their products: HipFlics 1.1 (for QuickTime video and audio compression), LiveSlideShow 2.0 (for creating simple interactive slide shows), and LiveStage Professional 3.0 (for creating rich, interactive QuickTime movies). Get the details at the Totally Hip OS X Bundle page.
You can comparisons of video compressed using HipFlics and Cleaner 5 at Totally Hip's HipFlics Showcase site.
Friends of Time is a new web site and organization dedicated to the QuickTime community. It was founded by many of the original developers of QuickTime. The web site includes all sorts of historical information and artifacts concerning QuickTime.
There's another text track creation tool now available for Mac OS X, called Textation. Read more and download a demo version at the Feelorium web site.
Camtasia 3.0 (a tool for doing motion screen capture on a Windows computer) has been released. It can output QuickTime movies. See the What's New in Camtasia 3.0 page. You can download a 30-day trial version at the Camtasia Downloads page. (We tried it and it worked.)
Version 2.6b0 of Panorama Tools (a freeware plug-in that works with a number of graphics programs for manipulating QTVR panos) is at the Panorama Tools page.
There's an upgraded version of PanoramaMaker, a $30 tool that stitches images together to form a panorama which can be saved as a QuickTime VR movie. See ArcSoft's PanoramaMaker product page.
There's a tutorial at streamingmedia.com on "Detecting Streaming Media Players", which includes information on detecting QuickTime.
A public preview release of the next version of Apple's QuickTime Streaming Server is now available. It includes MPEG-4 streaming, MP3 streaming, and "enhanced stream quality". Go to the QuickTime Streaming Server 4 Public Preview page.
HipFlics 1.1 has been released. This is a compression tool that's not quite as full-featured as the professional tool, Cleaner, and doesn't do Sorenson 2-pass Variable Bit Rate encoding (as does Cleaner, and another new tool, Squeeze), but it does have a number of good features (including batch processing and multiple codec application) and is considerably less expensive than Cleaner. You can read more about it in a MacCentral article "Totally Hip releases HipFlics 1.1 for OS X"; if you go to the Totally Hip web site, you'll find a link to download a demo.
New versions of VideoScript (version 2.2.7) for Windows, Mac OS, and and Mac OS X are available at the VideoScript Download page. (VideoScript is a tool that can be used to write scripts for processing video.)
IOXperts has released a beta version of its DCam driver; this is software to allow for web cam use under Mac OS X. You can find more information (including a list of cameras that are supported) and download the software at the FireWire DCam Driver page.
Virtual Composer (a QuickTime music composition tool) has been updated to version 2.9.2. See the VersionTracker Virtual Composer More Info page.
Apple and Lucasfilm have posted the Star Wars Episode II trailer. You can see them at the Star Wars Episode II Teaser Trailer page. (To see the highest quality one, you'll need QuickTime Pro.)