Digital Video File Formats (1994)

Interesting historical note: this "Dr. Dobbs Journal" article was written by the president of the company sued by Apple later in 1994 for the re-use of Quicktime-for-Windows source code in VFW, eventually leading to Microsoft's 1997 "Apple bailout" settlement.

"Mark is president of the San Francisco Canyon Company, which developed QuickTime for Windows for Apple Computer. Canyon publishes the Movie Toolkit, a C++ class library for manipulating QuickTime and AVI movie files, and Canyon Clipz!. Canyon's How to Digitize Video will be published by John Wiley in early 1994."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

"The lawsuit Apple Computer v. San Francisco Canyon Co., filed on December 6, 1994, alleged that the San Francisco Canyon Company used some of the code developed under contract to Apple in their additions to Video for Windows. Apple expanded the lawsuit to include Intel and Microsoft on February 10, 1995, alleging that Microsoft and Intel knowingly used the software company to aid them in stealing several thousand lines of Apple's QuickTime code in their effort to improve the performance of Video for Windows."

One of the coolest aspects of the QuickTime format (the one I know the most about) was the separation of the moov and mdat atoms. It let an editing application define cuts and add tracks without reserializing (to say nothing of re-encoding) the whole file. A track referenced in a moov header could also point to an entirely different file on disk. A lot of non-destructive edits could simply be performed on the moov header which could live on a small slow disk referencing mdats in files living on a large fast disk. Thanks to the way aliases worked the external file could be an alias to sort of get automatically found if the large fast disk was removable like an external SCSI disk.

This let the relatively weak 68k Macs of the day do offline editing of video without a bunch of extra hardware (like the Amiga's VideoToaster).

The QuickTime format did allow the moov and mdat atoms to be serialized into a monolithic file so they could work on single fork file systems. The format was later extended so external references could be URLs. Ref Movies were a small MOV that referenced tracks living at different URLs.

This was extended further to tag referenced tracks with bandwidth settings much like how HLS works. A small Ref Movie could point to a postage stamp 56k stream and a high res T1 stream (or whatever bandwidth) and the player depending on its local network conditions would pick the appropriate reference. QuickTime Player 7's "Export for Web" function used this method. It would encode multiple versions of a movie then build a Ref Movie pointing to them. It even built a small HTML file with the appropriate embed/object tag incantation to stick the output on the web easily.

RealPlayer had similar reference functionality with RAM files, they could reference streams at multiple bandwidths to let the player pick the appropriate one for local conditions.

> Imagine if mass-storage devices were cheap enough that you could afford 307 gigabytes for a single movie. Your hardware would still have to support a sustained data rate of 1 Mbyte per second to play it back.

I recently bought a $20 flash drive to store the entire contents of a my friend's late-2000s PC with a 250GB hard drive on. Didn't think much of it.

(Yes, I know the article is from 1994.)

Video file formats is probably one division of "practical computing" where the last 30 years really made a big difference. MP3 was invented in 1991 and revolutionized the music industry. In my impression, DivX had a somewhat comparable impact on sharing and streaming movies.

Modern video compression is so amazing efficient that it always blasts my head how a short movie is only slightly larger then a JPEG still frame. I don't know any other lossy file compression which is similarly amazing.

The first time I watched video stream on the PC through the internet was through RealPlayer G2 on a 33600bps modem. I could never use VDOLive, but I remember it to be well regarded at the time.

Anyone knows a simple FLOSS app that allows me stream a camera directly from my computer? I'd like to try exposing the capture of a webcam through TOR to access it from anywhere without requiring any specialized service.

I have a bunch of .moov video files from the Mac that I've been trying for years to figure out how to view again. QuickTime on the Mac no longer recognizes them, even though they were originally QuickTime movies. Maybe even from the QuickTake camera. Does anyone here know a way to open those old files?