From: ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University)
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: What's New in QuickTime 1.5
Date: 6 Nov 92 11:49:36 +1300
Organization: University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

A number of people seem to believe that QuickTime 1.5 includes speedups for
playing back existing movies. Let's get this quite clear: this is *NOT* true.
I've noticed that scaling movies to half- and double-size works better,
but you are not going to see any improvements in playing back existing movies
at their normal size.

The big speed improvement comes in the new Compact Video compressor. However,
to take advantage of this, you must recreate your movies using the new
compressor. Decompressing your existing movies and recompressing them with
Compact Video will work, but you're going to lose image quality. For best
results, you should go back to your original image sources to recreate the
movies.

Just for interest, here's a list of the important new features of QuickTime 1.5,
as best as I can determine from the information currently available:

* The new Compact Video compressor, already mentioned. With an image size of
  360*240 pixels, you can get 10 frames per second playback on an LC, up to
  over 40 frames per second on a Quadra 950. Naturally smaller images will
  give even faster rates. The main drawback is that the compression stage is
  very slow.
* Real-time dithering on playback now works at 1 bit per pixel. You don't have
  to recreate your movies to take advantage of this one!
* Includes a standard "compression dialog" component. This lets a program
  ask the user for compression settings in a standard way, with preview
  options and so on. Also lets the programmer easily create a compression
  sequence based on settings specified by the user in the dialog.
* The "Things!" utility also reports the presence of a "progress dialog"
  component, but I have no documentation on this.
* Includes a decompressor for Kodak Photo CD images.
* The video digitizer interface adds support for digitizers which are capable
  of directly returning compressed images. This isn't just useful for high-end
  hardware like the RasterOps MoviePak or the SuperMac DigitalFilm; it can even
  be useful for a low-end card like the SuperMac VideoSpigot, which prefers
  to return data in YUV format rather than RGB format.
* Movie import/export components. Standard ones are provided for importing
  PICS files, and converting between QuickTime movies and various sound file
  formats, among others. And you can add your own. Check out the new MoviePlayer
  program from ftp.apple.com; this replaces the old Simple Player. It will
  open a PICS file, and convert it to a QuickTime movie for you!
* A new "text" standard media type. I have no documentation on its exact
  capabilities, but it looks like you can add captions to movies, with simple
  scrolling animations.
* Support for custom media types! You don't even have to write a new media
  handler entirely from scratch, as you can delegate a lot of functions
  (particularly scheduling ones) to the Apple-provided "generic" media handler.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro                       fone: +64-7-856-2889
Computer Services Dept                     fax: +64-7-838-4066
University of Waikato            electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
Hamilton, New Zealand    37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+13:00
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia