Quicktime 4 Linux was the first convenient way to read and write
uncompressed Quicktime movies on Linux. Today Quicktime 4 Linux is
intended mainly for content creation and uncompressed movies. These
usually arise during the production phase and not the distribution
phase of a movie. It has improvements in colormodel support, bit
depth, accuracy, reliability, and codecs, while not stressing
economy.
FEATURES
Quicktime 4 Linux is the foundation for many of the features of Cinelerra. It includes several front ends
to encoders and decoders which are used by applications directly.
DV FRONT END
Included in Quicktime for Linux is a front end for the libdv engine. This front end
was started when libdv was really crude. Since then, libdv has gotten
better but the abstraction layer remains.
JPEG FRONT END
A parallel JPEG engine using libjpeg is implemented with a front end.
This uses 2 processors for field based JPEG compression and 1 processor
for frame based compression. It also supports some common marker
operations.
COLORSPACE CONVERSION
A general colorspace converter implements colorspace conversion with
nearest neighbor scaling for the large number of nonstandard
colorspaces that Cinelerra uses.
STEP UP TO THE MICROSOFT
Quicktime 4 Linux reads and writes some AVI files. AVI support has
grown over the years, since this is of course the standard on Linux,
but is continuously evolving since AVI is not consistent. Currently it
reads and writes reasonably compatible AVI files less than or greater
than 2GB. The AVI mode supports MJPG, DV, and some compressed
codecs.
CODECS
Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the
movies you download from the internet. Quicktime is a wrapper for many
different kinds of compression formats. What you knew as "Quicktime
4", "Quicktime 5", "Quicktime 6", are really different
distributions of compression formats. The codecs we support are mainly
uncompressed.
DOWNLOAD
Download Quicktime for Linux from the
download page.
CHANGES
7/2/06 - Frames are cached when reading the first frame after a
seek. This allows faster reverse playback.
Old news
(C) 2007 Flat broke, low paid programmers.
