Ouch, that is not good if QT7 H.264 is already showing inferior to
other codecs out there. Apple touted mpeg4 but never really became a
contender in that market. They've been hyping H.264 harder then ever
and if other H.264 encoders do a better job then they're missing the
boat big time.
Why? A lot of Quicktime's value for H.264 is having a popular
decoder/client... having an open standard means precisely that we have
other choices for encoding. Just like DVDSP can work with better MPEG-2
encoders, and Apple's MPEG-4 decoder can work with better standard
profile encoders (like 3iVX minus the ASP features).
Apple's support for H.264 will help create the market for H.264
products... QT is just one of them, and so far it looks pretty good to
me but again, we have an open standard designed exactly to allow third
parties to play.
