Quicktime 7 = HiDef (HDTV)

This is only for the geeks--you have been warned!

Quicktime 7 has been anything but quick! Without doing any checking my guess is that Quicktime 6 has been around for a good 4 or 5 years. Will 7 be worth the wait? I think it will and here's why.

HD Video (High Definition) is going to be huge. I have viewed a couple of film trailers in HD format on the 20' iMac LCD and they looked quite stunning. Even the lowest flavour of HD is 4 times sharper than the very best DVD and it shows. Right now the only people that can get easy access to HD Video are the Americans where some cable firms transmit shows in the new standard, but I have a hunch that the will change this year, that's where Quicktime 7 connection comes in.

Quicktime 7 contains the new codec, H.264. Simply put, this provides up to four times the frame size of video encoded with today's MPEG-4 video codec at the same data rate. That one statement changes everything! Well not 'everything', but everything in connection with video compression. :-)

In the real world it will mean that Quicktime 7 video at the data rate of 50k a second (standard broadband) will look like today's video at 200k a second. And 200kbs MP4 video looks very close to DVD quality, so that's pretty big news! Taking it one step further, applying some calculations to the ideas above it would to be possible to provide HD quality video in real time over a fast broadband connection. 2 megabit per second broadband connections are becoming quite popular even now, so in a year or two they will surely be very common, even a 1 megabit connection would allow the viewer to start watching the film after only 45 minutes of buffering.

Apple have already announced 2005 as the year of HD, so could they have something in mind other than iMovie HD? An iPod Video Store to complement the relaunched and renamed iPod Music Store perhaps? They could even offer a twin grade service, a film in HD format at £16 or the same film but in DVD qaulity format for just £7. It might even be possible for them to offer individual TV episodes at £1 each.

The more I look at this the more it seems that the age of delivering content on bits of cirlcular plastic is over. Its happening to music right now, video can't be too far behind can it?

I did say it was just for geeks!