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MacUser: News: Analysis: QuickTime X walks before it runs

Analysis 2:30PM, Thursday 17th September 2009

By the time Apple came to develop video playing features for the iPhone, it was clear that the legacy QuickTime code wasn’t up to the job. That, together with Apple’s commitment to transition its applications to 64-bit Cocoa meant that something had to be done. So it took the engine it had built for the iPhone and used it to develop something new. That something was a complete, top-to-bottom re-write of the QuickTime framework. QuickTime X is not an upgrade to QuickTime 7, it’s a brand new framework and application.

The result is a video playback engine that exploits the capabilities of modern graphics processing units and, on a reasonably modern Mac, allows smooth-as-silk high-definition video playback. The downside, apart from the lack of editing features, is that QuickTime X plays a very limited range of codecs and there’s no support for plug-ins to add new ones. And if your Mac doesn’t have a modern graphics card, performance may even be worse than in QuickTime 7.

The good news is that QuickTime X is a beginning, not an end. Apple has taken a wise decision to focus on getting the basics right with QuickTime X and release it with limited features, rather than try and cram everything into what is essentially a 1.0 release. As with other applications, where the transition from Carbon to 64-bit Cocoa has been made without the addition of new features, Apple’s developers have been cautious but sensible.

We can only speculate about where QuickTime will go from here because Apple, in line with its stance of not commenting on unannounced products, won’t tell us. But it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine that future versions of QuickTime X, probably released along with updates to Mac OS X, will put back the missing features. So, in the next version, we might see support for plug-ins, and in the one after that, the return of the Properties window in Player, and along with it the ability to cut and paste sections from individual tracks. Although it’s unlikely that all the old features will return – for example, so much video is now shot on progressive scan video cameras that support for de-interlacing might be deemed unnecessary.

In the meantime, QuickTime 7 will be updated to ensure it remains stable and secure, and will remain a part of Mac OS X for some time to come. It’s not an ideal situation, but developing a modern API for playing back audio and video, with support for Mac OS X, the iPhone, and Windows was never going to be easy. Apple has made many transitions in recent years; from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, from PowerPC to Intel, and from 32-bit Carbon to 64-bit Cocoa, and it’s learned a great deal.

Perhaps the most important lessons are not to try and do everything at once and to maintain support for the outgoing tool – whether it be Mac OS 9 with Classic, PowerPC with Rosetta, or QuickTime 7, while the replacement finds its feet. Classic has long since disappeared from the standard Mac OS X installation, Rosetta followed suit with Snow Leopard, and eventually QuickTime 7 will follow them. By then, QuickTime X will be several generations old and we’ll have forgotten what all the fuss was about when it was introduced.

Kenny Hemphill

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  For example, we can only hear signals within a very small portion of frequencies from about 12 Hz to 20000 Hz, out of a very large number of frequencies in the Universe.  We call this band of frequencies sound.  We can only see signals with wavelengths from 380 nm to 740 nm and this spectrum spread we call light.  We are limited in our perception, but these sensors are good enough for us.  For the rest of the signals, we build electronic equipment to enhance our sensors.

From an article on the Mastering Electronics Design
Read the entire article: It’s an Analog World by Design by Adrian S. Nastase
Edited beyond Fair Use…so click on the link to read the full article

The signals we receive from Mother Nature are continuous.  We don’t hear any discontinuity or choppiness in the sounds of ocean waves or bird songs and this is what makes the world analog.  From our point of view, with the sensors we have, we interact with our world continuously.  The signals have amplitude that can vary in time and are composed of a complex of frequencies.

So how is Analog defined?  Merriam-Webster dictionary reads that analog is “of, relating to, or being a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities.”  The word comes from the ancient Latin, analogus, or Greek, analogos, meaning proportional.  The term was adopted most likely due to the fact that the continuous signal we perceive is proportional to another continuous signal;  or …

No matter the reason for which the word analog was associated with continuous electrical signals, the analog domain and the analog design are here to stay because we live in a continuous world as we perceive it.  The interface between our world and our instruments and electrical equipment has to be analog. …

We need to amplify and filter the signals we capture … in analog domain and the circuits we achieve these operands and tasks with, are called Analog Signal Processing.

Analog signals and analog processing have their own limitations and that is why we digitize the signals, …

The design of the electronic circuits that manage the analog processing is very subjective.  There are many ways to handle different tasks in the analog domain, …

The design cannot be automated as with the digital circuits.  Sure, there are computer tools like SPICE based programs, which can verify and calculate the analog design, but the schematics have to be created by a human being in the first place.  Maybe that is why we have so many computer tools to automatically create digital circuits, while the analog tools are still to be invented.  Human creativity is difficult to be automated.  Maybe a distant future, when artificial intelligence will approach creativity, might be able to automatically create analog circuits.  But, will it? 

Read the entire article: It’s an Analog World by Design by Adrian S. Nastase 

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