TNH I can't help but agree. We're repeatedly presented with quicktime downgraders. QuickTime went from a media layer that could auto-update third party components through a simple interface to one where you have to visit the third party website and wonder what you need and what you should pay for. In interest of security this might make sense, except all apple has to do is an internal security audit and only allow auto-update of approved components. Then we lost the ac3 and divx components. That's making it worse. Pay your pro fee and it looks a bit better, but there are lots of freeware applications that add pro features. Pay your mpeg-2 fee and you end up w/ a slow finder that tries to load those previews and you can't just tell it not to. So we have h.264, except it's the slowest implementation on the mac platform. Perhaps QuickTime h.264 is higher quality than x264 codec based encoding, but it's not 'Quick' at all. Then there's the part about placing every setting within a dictated type. Want this type of audio codec, then use this audio setting; regardless of container. So you can't get the codec you want in the 'legal' container in a lot of instances. Further there still isn't good AMR support (can we get some WB and some WB+). What about 'experimental' codecs. It's not very cutting edge from Apple Some things are just backwards (adding a soundtrack to a video track has to be done in a certain order?) Very finally, .mov is beyond insane for some things. You extract an AAC for production where you want to sync it w/in a different Application to a Video stream, except there's no easy way to save it as an all recognized everywhere available AAC (we're not talking copy protected here). Self-contained mov is what most people end up w/ w/o re-encoding or using another application; in which case what's the point of this rich media layer. How about quality settings. Can we get 'advanced' and actual numbers in there someplace. Apples delay in promoting QuickTime on anything but Apple and Windows operating systems has been costly and the failure to give pro-payers a pro-grade app is pitiful. I think QuickTime in this generation is a big step back when open source technology should be embraced.
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