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jaredbkt · Oct 4, 2002, 06:26 PM

Take a look at this interesting article by everyone's favorite reporter (if you can call him that). In my opinion, most of what he says is basically Microsoft marketing and not much substance.

http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/wm9series.asp

Scroll down to the part about the Apple lies regarding media technologes. All he does is restate MS marketing and nothing more. Some investigative writing, eh?

I suggest everyone write a professionally worded email to him. Help our buddy, Paul, understand the benefits of MPEG 4 and open standards.

voodoo · Oct 5, 2002, 11:17 AM

from article:

WMV 9 features 15-30 percent performance and quality improvements over WMV 8, and three times the compression efficiency of MPEG-4. So how bad is MPEG-4, you ask? A 6 Mbps MPEG-4 movie, quality-wise, is comparable to a 2 Mbps WMV 9 movie, that's how bad. At 300 Kbps, WMV 9 makes QuickTime 6/MPEG-4 look silly. Even a 150 Kbps WMV 9 movie looks better than the same movie in 300 Kbps QT6 MPEG-4. It's embarrassing. Adding insult to injury, "Apple's MPEG-4 implementation is one of the worst out there," says Amir Majidimehr, the General Manager of Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division. 'It is so bad we were worried that you [reviewers] would think we were faking it."

whaaaa? QuickTime is embarrassing? Compared to... WiMP?

The moral of this story kids is don't smoke crack.

Subzero Diesel949 · Oct 6, 2002, 06:18 PM

Already in The Lounge...sigh.

el chupacabra · Oct 6, 2002, 10:24 PM

Well as unreliable as this guy probably is the sad thing is he is probably right. Open standards has nothing to do with quality and obviously isn't helping MPEG-4 as far as quality goes. At this time DIVX is the best there is as far as mpeg-4 goes. I've spent months using all different settings to find the best quality to compression ratio with QT MPEG-4 component, DIVX, and winmedia 9. I planned on posting the results here for people so they wouldn't have to go through the same time I did to make a good quality movie but when I updated to 10.2 my prefences were erased for Some of the programs.....in any case MPEG-4 came out last out of the compressing schemes I was using. When I compared my results with various other testers at vcdhelp.com they came up with similar results as I saddly.....I 'd like to think I just dont know what im doing but thats not the case. Many features of Apple's MPEG-4 component are even documented as not working/enabled which deficiates things greatly as far as QT is concerned. QT 'S MPEG-4 is sorry and I really can't wait till it's updated and fixes all the things Apple claimed they would fix months ago. It's great as far as streaming media goes but the quality just isn't there.

So the guy in the article has a point.....it is sad that something as lame as windows media can surpass QT in any way.

klinux · Oct 8, 2002, 06:28 PM

PT has his detractors in the PC/MS world too but that is OT.

I cannot agree more with el chupacabra. Why should QT or VO always be better just because it is made by Apple or if its open source? I don't see Apple offer 2-pass VBR or mathematically lossless codec or 5.1 sound. It would be nice if Apple would offers those features but until then, do realize that it is possible that other people can come up with technology better than Apple (and vice versa of course).

voodoo · Oct 8, 2002, 09:21 PM

Who let the trolls in?

klinux · Oct 15, 2002, 08:02 PM

Keep your mind open...

I am a mostly PC user but I would not hesitate to admit that other OS or hardware (I do not mean just Apple here) have their strengths. Why can't Mac users be the same???