[Horsepoo!!!]

froody over at ArsTechnica brings us this juicy tidbit:

just a quick note, haven't had time to read the whole thread but here's my input:

CoreImage ROCKS!!! It takes a list of the effects you want in a stack, and then optimizes them for successive effects that can be implemented in one operation on the video card, so yeah, it's heavily optimized and kicks ass.

They also seem to have taken alot of feedback on quicktime, completely re-written the API, so now you can make a video player in interface builder with no code whatsoever, and you can do cool stuff like map H.264 onto a surface as a texture, and do anything else with that surface that you chould normally do in OpenGL, I'm assuming you can also map CoreImage filters ontop of this either as a texture filter or for the whole scene. Very very cool stuff, totally blown away. I just left a session on the performance tools and they've had alot of work too

ps CoreImage doesn't work on anything below nvidia FX cards of the radeon 9600, which is gay, no cool ripple effect in dashboard for me

QT7 is near.

[Earth Mk. II]

nifty.

[Adam Betts]

WHOO! I was thinking that it has to be a rewrite after seeing the changes to main QT window (real brushed metal, etc)

SO thrilled now

[ryju]

According to the keynote video I watched, CoreImage and CoreVideo do indeed rock.

[Millennium]

The rewrites to the player (true brushed-metal, for example) actually wouldn't have required a rewrite to QuickTime, and the bit about creating a player in InterfaceBuilder only requires a better NSMovieView wrapper; no need for the core of QuickTime to change.

However, integrating with CoreImage/CoreVideo is another matter entirely. I'm just picking nits for the sake of completeness here.

[Developer]

Originally posted by Millennium:
The rewrites to the player (true brushed-metal, for example) actually wouldn't have required a rewrite to QuickTime, and the bit about creating a player in InterfaceBuilder only requires a better NSMovieView wrapper; no need for the core of QuickTime to change.

You are an Apple-apologist.

What does the CoreImag� integration mean for QuickTime for Windows? Is it discontinued?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Developer:
You are an Apple-apologist.

How? I'm just noting that these things don't have to do with QuickTime itself. There do, however, seem to be other reasons for QuickTime to get some code changes.

The APIs do not necessarily need to have changed, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that they have done so (except on Cocoa, and that's a non-Windows thing anyway).

Even if the Carbon-level APIs have changed, this does not necessarily mean there are compatibility issues. If no existing functions were changed (and this is possible), then existing code should continue to work.

What does the CoreImag� integration mean for QuickTime for Windows? Is it discontinued?

Probably not. My guess is that some future version of QT/Windows will behave much like the Mac version, only without the CoreImage integration.

[eevyl]

I guess that they just finished the Cocoa wrappers for QuickTime, which as many many parts of the core Mac OS X is written in Carbon (for speed and other issues). That does not mean at all a rewritte of the core API, as noted, and should not mean anything for QT for Windows.

Finally having QT easy accesible in Cocoa (without calling Carbon) with a full feature set of NS classes would rock.

[CharlesS]

ps CoreImage doesn't work on anything below nvidia FX cards of the radeon 9600, which is gay, no cool ripple effect in dashboard for me

Ouch!

Jeez, I'm not usually one to complain about system requirements, but hopefully this gets lightened up by the time Tiger is released... aren't the nVidia FX and Radeon 9600 high-end cards? Only the most expensive machines in Apple's current line-up have them!

CoreImage seems like a great thing for developers, but I'm not sure anyone is going to want to use it if they will lock out most of their users. Hopefully this is just a beta thing...

[Krypton]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Ouch!

Jeez, I'm not usually one to complain about system requirements, but hopefully this gets lightened up by the time Tiger is released... aren't the nVidia FX and Radeon 9600 high-end cards? Only the most expensive machines in Apple's current line-up have them!

CoreImage seems like a great thing for developers, but I'm not sure anyone is going to want to use it if they will lock out most of their users. Hopefully this is just a beta thing...

I was pretty sure that Steve said these things would scale depending on what setup you have. So you may get some effects on less able machines.

[qnxde]

QuickTime is at 6.6 as of the WWDC preview, it appears to now be in cocoa (movies live resize, it has sheets etc) The whole thing is now a lot smoother - no delays while going fullscreen and out of, etc. H.264 is AMAZING. Doing some more tests now - it's fairly slow to encode tho.

[Graymalkin]

A lot of the CI stuff demoed in the keynote all utilized the realtime High Dynamic Range (HDR) capabilities of the latest nVidia and ATi GPUs. The accelerated effects are just pixel shader programs (fragments to OpenGL folk). These can be done in software but they'll be a lot slower than their accelerated counterparts. The late model Radeons and GeForce chips all support 32-bit floating point math in their pixel shaders, something older chips do not support. To get the full accelerated effects of CI you'll definitely need a newer GPU. However I would imagine the final version will scale the effects down to match your processor. That's what's been done with Quartz Extreme on systems without real GPUs. Expos� and window compositing work on older systems but have to be done entirely in software which is a noticeably slower than the fully accelerated effects.

[nforcer]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Jeez, I'm not usually one to complain about system requirements, but hopefully this gets lightened up by the time Tiger is released... aren't the nVidia FX and Radeon 9600 high-end cards? Only the most expensive machines in Apple's current line-up have them!

I think most would say the Radeon 9600 is a decent card, but is not considered high end by today's standards. Apple has been criticized for not including a Radeon 9800 XT in their most expensive machines (possibly because its size reduces the number of PCI X slots from 3 to 2), but it's good some of the new Tiger features won't require something that powerful.

[SYN]

it's a bit disappointing to see the Finder still doesn't see files created by the terminal.

Great news about the QT player. Is encoding still modal though (ie does it block completely the player)?

I was wondering about how live the queries are, ie if you search for something, the finder displays results, now if you go create a file that corresponds to the search criteria, does the finder live update the search window or do you have to run the search again?

[Synotic]

Originally posted by SYN:
it's a bit disappointing to see the Finder still doesn't see files created by the terminal.

Great news about the QT player. Is encoding still modal though (ie does it block completely the player)?

I was wondering about how live the queries are, ie if you search for something, the finder displays results, now if you go create a file that corresponds to the search criteria, does the finder live update the search window or do you have to run the search again?

Hi SYN

From Apple Search Technologies page:

When you make a change, such as adding a new file, receiving an email or entering a new contact, the metadata engine updates its index automatically.

So that doesn't necessarily mean that it currently updates already open search windows, but if the index is always up to date then it wouldn't be too hard for Apple to do.

Oh and new QuickTime Player + better Cocoa support is great .

[Developer]

Originally posted by qnxde:
QuickTime is at 6.6 as of the WWDC preview, it appears to now be in cocoa (movies live resize, it has sheets etc)

You mean QuickTime Player is now Cocoa. However Carbon applications can have live resizing and sheets as well, so that says nothing.

[SYN]

Originally posted by Developer:
You mean QuickTime Player is now Cocoa. However Carbon applications can have live resizing and sheets as well, so that says nothing.

It does mean the video display of QT Player isn't done via QuickDraw anymore, which is pretty cool already

[Developer]

Originally posted by SYN:
It does mean the video display of QT Player isn't done via QuickDraw anymore, which is pretty cool already

I don't think QuickTime relies on QuickDraw for anything much currently. It has it's own blitter that is more capable than QuickDraw's and can use the graphic card in ways QuickDraw can't.

[qnxde]

Originally posted by Developer:
You mean QuickTime Player is now Cocoa. However Carbon applications can have live resizing and sheets as well, so that says nothing.

Well how do I tell? The Resources folder is now stuffed full of bits of the player interface made out of .tif files and English.lproj is full of subfolders with names like QTPMovieProgress.nib SaveAsOptionsAccessory.nib QTPMovieWindow.nib OpenURLPanel.nib MainMenu.nib and so forth. "file" returns:

/Applications/QuickTime Player.app/Contents/MacOS/QuickTime Player: Mach-O executable ppc

for the executable. Is there anything else I can do to verify whether it is cocoa or not?

[Developer]

Originally posted by qnxde:
Well how do I tell? The Resources folder is now stuffed full of bits of the player interface made out of .tif files and English.lproj is full of subfolders with names like QTPMovieProgress.nib SaveAsOptionsAccessory.nib QTPMovieWindow.nib OpenURLPanel.nib MainMenu.nib and so forth.

Yes, that looks like Cocoa. If you open a nib in Interface Builder it tells you whether it is a Carbon or Cocoa nib.

Even when QuickTime Player is now a Cocoa application, QuickTime is sill a thing of its own.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by qnxde:
QuickTime is at 6.6 as of the WWDC preview, it appears to now be in cocoa (movies live resize, it has sheets etc) The whole thing is now a lot smoother - no delays while going fullscreen and out of, etc. H.264 is AMAZING. Doing some more tests now - it's fairly slow to encode tho.

An app does not have to be Cocoa to have live resizing and sheets. However, you can check whether an app is Cocoa or Carbon by running otool -L on the app's binary. If it links against the Cocoa framework, it's a Cocoa app.

[crystalthunder]

People are complaining about the requirements for the graphics cards, but have you heard of the Longhorn system requirements?!!! Apparently even the high end Radeon's are running at full capacity to operate the top-end Avalon processes.

Microsoft is hoping the late release date will work in their favor:

Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.

- Microsoft-Watch.com

Apple's stuff works today!

Granted those requirements are for the yet to be seen Windows GUI, but still.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by Developer:
Yes, that looks like Cocoa. If you open a nib in Interface Builder it tells you whether it is a Carbon or Cocoa nib.

Even when QuickTime Player is now a Cocoa application, QuickTime is sill a thing of its own.

The QuickTime Player app may now be Cocoa, but not QuickTime itself.

QuickTime is neither Carbon nor Cocoa. It's just QuickTime. Carbon and Cocoa only deal with user-interface stuff. QuickTime is lower-level than either of them. Of course, both Carbon and Cocoa have ways to access QuickTime, but so do Win32 and Java; these are not part of QuickTime so much as wrappers around it. It looks like these wrappers, more than anything else, are what was rewritten; QuickTime itself is probably more or less unchanged.

[goMac]

That... Rocks...

I told our lead guy to go to the performance session. It will be interesting to hear what they said.

[Angus_D]

Originally posted by Millennium:
QuickTime is neither Carbon nor Cocoa. It's just QuickTime. Carbon and Cocoa only deal with user-interface stuff. QuickTime is lower-level than either of them.

Actually, QuickTime was heavily dependent on parts of Carbon (n�e Toolbox) -- to the extent that several of the managers were effectively ported to Win32 so it ran. Loads of horrible crusty data structures abound (I think that until Panther you still had to use FSSpec, which is generally regarded as bad - there's some technote on why if you actually care), and it's generally a PITA to use (very little integration with CoreFoundation and stuff, etc).

[goMac]

The best way to usually deal with QuickTime is use NSMovie and access the QTMovie through Cocoa to pass into Carbon. That way you can cut FSSpec/FSRef out of the equation for the most part.