Re: Quicktime

[GUDATH@EZINFO.VMSMAIL.ETHZ.CH (Henrik 'Ratte' Gudat)]

In <19970901002501.UAA18940@ladder02.news.aol.com> zippedgs@aol.com writes:

> QuickTime uses a complex vector-quantization compression scheme, but a
> simple lookup-table decompression scheme. The problem however is that the
> throughput requirements may not be feasible on a GS. Does anyone have

Quicktime does not use a particular compression scheme. Instead, it bases on
codecs which include JPEG, CinePak, 'animation' (RLE), 'video' (?) and
a whole lot more of different compression methods.

While I do not believe that a generic Quicktime player would make a lot of
sense, writing a stripped-down player that can display a specific compression
should be feasible. One could convert a QuickTime movie on the mac into a
GS-compatible format (like Animation/16 colors grayscale) and use a player on
the IIgs.

Most codecs do not require immense processing power for the decoding process.
(For example, CinePak can take forever to compress a movie but the compressed
data is trimmed to decode fast and within a particular badnwidth.) Still, I'm
not sure if the IIgs could handle it. For the more 'stupid' methods such as
run-length encoding, maybe, but surely not for things like JPG.

- henrik