[Bf-committers] TIFF support - submitted patch #2995

[Matt Ebb]

On 07/09/2005, at 03:19 AM, D.J. Capelis wrote:

> A difficult decision indeed, but from what I remember qt isn't a
> terrible joy to use across platform either while libtiff and ffmpeg  
> are
> a bit more portable.  Someone correct me if I'm wrong on this.

> If we do take out qt then the missing features such as PSD support can
> be redone properly at another point in time as such features usually
> aren't working on all platforms or aren't really implemented very well
> anyways.

In all my experiences with it on both Mac and Windows, QuickTime  
works very well across both these platforms that it supports.

For myself, and plenty of other professionals for whom QuickTime is  
'the' pipeline format, removing QuickTime support is not an option  
unless its functionality is replicated very well. From what I can  
tell from the FFMPEG website, its QuickTime support is more like  
support for reading and writing the MOV video format, with a small  
bunch of codecs included.

QuickTime is much more than this - it's a media framework like  
DirectShow on Windows or gstreamer on Linux/etc. This means that  
whatever of my own codecs I have installed (such as MPEG2 codecs from  
QuickTime Pro or FCP, 10bit uncompressed codecs from other editing  
software, etc.) are accessible via the QuickTime connection. As far  
as I can see, FFMPEG does not do this - it's supported codecs are  
hard coded and are quite limited in range. Writing to the Animation  
codec which is the lossless intermediate format of choice (supports  
alpha, etc) is not supported by FFMPEG. Being a total framework,  
QuickTime is also useful for other things like image formats - I can  
use PSD images, PDFs, GIFs, most of whatever image codecs QuickTime  
has access to.

I would personally rather see more interoperability with OS-level  
media systems like QuickTime, DirectShow and gstreamer rather than  
forcing everyone to a consistent lower common denominator.

Cheers,

Matt