QuickTime 7 is the latest and greatest codec in my opinion and the quality is unsurpassed. I think everyone will appreciate the quality of future posts using QuickTime 7
Ok, here's one thing to say about QuickTime 7... It's not really a video format. It's just a bit of software (and, if you wanted to push a point, a file format.) The big deal about the quality of the video files QuickTime 7 is producing is the video standard it uses, which is called H.264, also known as "MPEG-4 Part 10". This is an ISO standard and is already in use in various hardware and software applications. Apple did not invent it or even perfect it. (Be grateful Apple has finally "got a clue" with this, by the way. Some of you long-term Mac users may not realise this, but up to and including QuickTime v5, QuickTime was an appallingly bad codec. I remember comparing MPEG-1 (which has been around a long time, people) to QuickTime MOV files and wondering what the hell Apple was doing wasting their time with such garbage. Long time Windows/Linux users, who are more used to MPEG videos, are therefore understandably dismissive of QuickTime. Yes, things have changes, but why shouldn't we have long memories?)
The QuickTime 7 player is free so I am not excluding anyone.
If only that were so. Admittedly I have not installed QuickTime 7, but if previous versions are anything to go by, QuickTime is "nagware", not "free". ("Buy QuickTime Pro! Buy QuickTime Pro!")
It is new and will eventually it will be available to all systems.
No it won't, and anyway, the key word in your sentence is "eventually". It doesn't exist on Linux, BEOS, or earlier versions of Windows or even MacOS. Again, based on previous versions, it is also a surprisingly crappy bit of software on Windows 2000/XP, with a bad user interface and a installer that tries to strangle every other bit of multimedia software on your system. There is a reason why there's a thing called "QuickTime Alternative" available for Windows PCs (which takes the QuickTime playback DLLs and removes all the other garbage) and that is that a lot of people do not want it on their systems! My opinion: There are many "MPEG-4 Part 2" compatible codecs out there, namely XviD, DivX, etc. With the right settings (bitrate) these are almost as good as H.264. They are also a lot more compatible with a wider variety of systems, including hardware MPEG-4 compatible DVD players, etc. QuickTime 7/H.264 is just a little bit too cutting/bleeding edge at the moment. By all means use it on your own system, but don't expect other people to want/be able to view them quite yet. If you want your files to have a wide audience, avoid using it for at least a few months. Now... If Yello remastered their video clips into QT7 .MOV files with 5.1 surround audio tracks and made them available on the net, maybe then I'd install QuickTime. But until then... Michael