H.264 + Quicktime is a viable alternative to Flash Video

Back in 2000 we started a contest to give an iMac to the first person / group to come up with a video container or method that would allow for streaming of Divx encoded Mpeg4 video over broadband. At that time there was no such method and Divx Networks — the company — didn’t exist.

We were able to sucessfully stream Divx files and some code landed in our laps as a result of the contest. That code was the first beginnings of h264.

From Slashdot today.

“According to Bloomberg, a jury ruled against Qualcomm in their patent lawsuit against Broadcom. Qualcomm had sought $8.3 million in damages for patent infringement stemming from Broadcom’s H.264 encoder/decoder chips. From the article: ‘The patents, covering a way to compress high-definition video, are unenforceable in part because Qualcomm withheld information from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, jurors in San Diego said today after deliberating less than six hours.’ This ruling clears the way for H.264 to become a widely adopted open standard.

Some news on the codec front [also from the Slashdot piece]

Already Linux and Free software people have a good H.264 implimentation thanks to the FFmpeg people. Their mpeg4 Divx-stuff is already very high quality.. much better then anything from Xvid or Divx, they have the beginnings of very good H.264 support and have decoding and encoding speeds that rival the best propriatory [sic] codecs [sic] aviable. They need to fill out some of the H.264 features, but if this is true that H.264 is truly usable in Free software environment, then I expect that development will very quickly take off as the people become aware of this and Linux distros will want to jump on the opportunity to provide world-class HD support!

All of this makes for some interesting possibilities to my way of thinking. Quicktime is a far better transport and delivery system for web video than Flash. There. I said it.

With the addition of H264 Quicktime and Apple have laid the ground word to become a serious and better alternative to high quality video streaming.

I’m going to offer some reasons in the part two of this piece.