Adobe scrambles to untangle itself from QuickTime after Apple throws it over a cliff Apple has finally informed its customers that it is no longer supporting QuickTime for Windows. Adobe, whose code is intertwined with QuickTime, is having to do a rapid reworking of its software to avoid putting users at risk. Last week, Trend Micro went public with the news that Apple had dumped support QuickTime for Windows …
Big Apple fan here. I am not happy with this decision.
Ditto. The correct way of doing this would have been an announcement and then a migration time (6 months or so). That way, migration would at least be a bit safer. They dropped the ball on this one IMHO.
On the plus side, that's yet another argument to avoid Adobe code. Cloud services with a silver lining, as it were..
"They dropped the ball on this one IMHO."
I'm not aware of Apple ever announcing EOL dates for OSX, IOS or other stuff. As far as I know, Apple doesn't promise any sort of updates for any of their stuff when they release new hardware/software.
They don't have to - Apple users are vocal supporters but don't raise fuss over EOL dates for some reason.
since when do Apple fans give a rat's ass about anything happening on the Windows platform? I sure as hell don't care if the beige beancounter boxes with the horridly dysfuntional operating system that is somehow supposedly on par with the media capabilities of the Mac except when it can't use Apple software, is able to play video, or just spreadsheets. Windows users have been tirelessly harping on about how Quicktime sucks, how teh WiMP is much better and Miultimedia was invented by IBM. If they want to watch video they can buy a TV, or use their UggsBox. Decades of pissing on Apple and Quicktime finally paid off, and they are on their own now.
Let them go and figure out how great their platform is without. I'll just sit here and grin at their fruitless efforts.*
As for Adobe, they stopped trying so long ago, they deserve whatever they get.
*) -
...wow. Just... wow
In my professional life as a Windows support engineer who runs his own business, I am often asked my opinion about whether to get a Mac, and I try to answer in as balanced a way as possible - eg, I often say yes for various use cases. What I never do is start frothing at the mouth in pointless fury.
QuickTime was only ever a virus anyway. They made iphones record in a proprietary format, forced users to install QuickTime that bundled iTunes and bonjour and other unrelated crap.
QuickTime did its job, as far as apple were concerned, it got their virus installed on windows by clueless idiots everywhere.
It's not just Adobe. I have an older version of Sony Vegas that still depends on Quicktime - even recent versions use Quicktime for reading and writing Quicktime files.
Quicktime provided a convenient API for video-handling and a bunch of useful codecs and was widely used in video applications, particularly those with pretensions to work on both Windows and Mac, some of them very high end.
Many products will be affected and many of them will have cost a fair amount of cash.
As far as I'm aware, the list of video editing programs requiring the Quicktime codecs is quite extensive: Adobe Premiere, Sony Vegas, Avid Media, Grass Valley Edius at least.
Thats a large chunk of the industry. You're going to have a lot of pissed off film makers.
I'm sure glad I've had Adobe in my portfolio for years.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/stockdetails/fi-126.1.ADBE.NAS?ocid=edgsp
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/topstories/looking-for-a-top-momentum-stock-3-reasons-why-adobe-systems-adbe-is-a-great-choice/ar-BBrtGeJ?ocid=edgsp
No, that happens every time you rely on someone else code for your product, especially if those who write it don't have an economic incentive to keep on.
It may go away any time, and if you don't have the skills to maintain it yourself, and nobody maintains it, you're in troubled waters. I've see also a lot of open source package become abandonware, and while the most used one have a chance to find new maintainers - but look at what happened to OpenSSL, millions of users, very few contributors - after all some products requires very specific skills to be worked on, a generic programmer can't really work proficiently and without causing damages on a security library or a video codecs one.
Agreed. To work on any Adobe product you'd certainly need to work on your ability to wade through faeces whilst telling everyone how beautiful the roses smelled.
Adobe is in the same league as IBM, SAP, Yahoo(!), HP, Oracle and Microsoft for hazardous levels of soul-destroying corporate toxicity and I feel for any developer working there.
Per the repeated story that QuickTime for Windows branched off a sanitised version of the Classic OS APIs that was backported to create Carbon for the OS X transition and was the central thing that caused QuickTime X to be a compatibility-breaking rewrite (which quite possibly still doesn't have a codec plug-in API?), I guess this is goodbye. And Win32 becomes the new Father of the House?
Apple abandoned QuickTime some time around 2009 when it became clear that its infinitely complex innards would be impossible to upgrade. QuickTime X, the promised modernization, stalled as soon as it could play H.264/AAC with moderate quality. Support for AVCHD files was eventually added but without the performance upgrades needed for its high bitrates.
@MartinB105, that's practicaly my experience of the video player too, it was atrocious to use and it really didn't make me want to buy any Apple products if they couldn't even get a simple video player working well.
I do have to deal with .MOV files these days though, because for some reason it's a preferred choice of video container for various sportcams/dashcams, but most recent video players & editors handle a huge variety of formats so it's not really an issue anymore.
Thinking about it now. QuickTime for Windows on the one occasion I ever wasted my time with it, on an early Pentium PC I expect, was such an unpleasant, buggy, lagging experience it coloured my views on Apple irremovably. I have never gone near any other Apple product ever. I expect QT did more to maintain PC sales than almost anything else. Well done Apple!
QuickTime is an excellent piece of software - and always has been. But QuickTime on Windows isn't really QuickTime. It's merely a player for QuickTime formats.
Real QuickTime, the sort you get on a Mac, is a complete API for handling media - whether graphic (still and video) or audio. It's flexible, and as far removed from QTfW as a jet fighter is from a hot air balloon.
Apple has behaved badly by not warning software developers of the imminent demise of QuickTime for Windows - but, really, The writing was on the wall when iTunes stopped using QTfW - it's just that Adobe chose not to read it. More fool them.
So kill the developmentally challenged embarrassment now. QTfW is not worth the candle.
@phuzz
I didn't say that it was an excellent piece of software on Windows. On the contrary, I pointed out that it's an abomination. A piece of crap.
As to whether the player is any good on Mac OS X, well I use VLC too. But on Mac OS X, the player is merely the visible tip of the iceberg - it isn't QuickTime. It's merely QuickTime Player. On Mac OS X, QuickTime is an entire API that can handle media based tasks, such as compression and decompression, very quickly and efficiently. It would appear that most people here are conflating the Player with QuickTime 'proper'. I believe that the QuickTime API on Windows, such as it is, is a shadow of its Mac OS equivalent.
This makes no sense. As a company, you are not obligated to release code. To be more specific, you are not obligated to release media-playing code. You can always rely on other companies' media formats.
If you do make a decision to develop your own media formats, with corresponding players and codecs, you are still not obligated to release them on competing platforms. Apple could have chosen not to release QuickTime on Windows at all. I suspect that, at the time, it did so because of its rather tiny mind and market share. i.e. QuickTime for Mac only would have had no users.
If they killed QuickTime overall (on Mac OSX too), no problem. If they had never published QuickTime on Windows, no problem either. Either way, I really won't miss it much.
What is truly unpleasant from Apple in this case is that they took the step to publish QuickTime on Windows, but they are quietly walking away from it with big fat holes in it. And they know full well that if they don't kill QuickTime everywhere then users will try to view their contents on Windows, at least some of the time.
Shady "install needed new codecs" tricks used to be a fairly common infection vectors for booby-trapped (pun intended) media files on porn sites. Which do include QuickTime files. Now, you don't even have to play the new codecs needed trick, you can just rely on some idiot running your honeypot with what he assumes to be a fit-for-purpose, issued-by-Apple, QuickTime player.
Once you do publish code, you assume reasonable responsibility for it, within your means. If you stop supporting it, you announce that loud and clear. And you take your users' safety seriously.
I think we all agree Apple's financial means aren't an excuse here.
It's like "trust us (just kidding)".
Apple needs to make a clean transition to either have QuickTime nowhere or safe QuickTime everywhere.
p.s. don't read any of this as any sign of sympathy towards Adobe. It isn't.
" QuickTime nowhere"
problem is, that's not an option near-term
Quicktime videos are so common as instructional / demo / introductory videos on setup disks for software and games. Its not so common now, but until maybe four years ago nearly every commercial software disk included Quicktime videos. Use one of those on a modern machine and its either going to install the (old) Quicktime player for you, or attempt to download it - with all the consequencces that JLV mentions
"Safety vids & preliminary exam questions for basic UK building site regs are offered on a CD in Quicktime.. but that's guvverment for you"
That won't be government.
The Cabinet Information Office has made it clear that all levels of uk.gov _must_ use portable, open, _documented_ formats. They've made it clear to a number of councils and other outfits who felt that "Word" was a standard that it's not. This applies to video formats too.
If you receive _anything_ that's not a proprietary format (and mov is proprietary) then a few complaints to the CIO are in order. They _will_ take action. (Most recent one for me was an order to the DfT to stop using some unreadable proprietary apple format in email attachments.)
This isn't a decision Apple just made one weekend - "oh well, here's another two bugs we need to fix but screw it, I don't feel like it, let's ask the boss to ask Tim Cook if we can end support for Quicktime"
Adobe was probably sitting on their hands hoping pressure from their customers would cause Apple to change their mind so they wouldn't have to fix their code. Adobe's bread and butter is video, and they have all sorts of video conversion technology. You can't tell me that use of a different format would be that difficult for them.
"I have a hard time believing Apple hadn't notified Adobe of this long ago "
Ha! This is arrogant Apple you're talking about here.
Arrogant sums them up so nicely - "unpleasantly proud and behaving as if you are more important than, or know more than, other people"
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