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Bill Meikle wrote:
> my guess is they might re-implement qtvr in openGL and although from a
> programmers point of view qtvr will be completely dead,
no need to re-implement from scratch. an openGL QTVR viewer, including a
somewhat buggy plugin, exists already for a few years:
<http://freepv.sourceforge.net/>
last year, sponsored by Google, we had a Summer of Code student clean up
the code and implement some new features including the display of SPi-V
panoramas <http://fieldofview.com/spv> which BTW is an often overlooked
but wonderful technology for VR.
this year another student was meant to take freepv to the next level and
integrate it into the VLC media player, but that student bailed out of
Summer of Code for a better paid job.
last year I was in California for the Google Summer of Code Mentor
Summit and on that occasion I met Eric Carlson and discussed FreePV with
him.
He (and by extension Apple) knows that there is a community of media
producers interested in keeping QTVR alive within QuickTime.
The license under which FreePV is released enables Apple to take the
code private and use is as it pleases - no strings attached. And if
Apple does not like the current license, the main developers are ready
to accommodate Apple's wish.
The main reason why FreePV exists is because Linux and BSD users don't
have access to the real QuickTime; and the different media player that
exist on Linux were interested in mainstream, linear content, not in
non-linear QTVR content. This is changing. Since last year's Google
Summer of Code VR is on the radar screen of at least one media playing
project, the VLC media player. Once one such media player integrates
QTVR-playback capabilities, other will follow.
Progress so far was by donation of time by the developers, and a
donation of 5000$ by Google - that's the price of such an internship
student. The student enjoyed broad support from experts in the field,
including Pablo d'Angelo (the engineer behind FreePV and hugin), Ken
Turkowski (the inventor of QTVR during his time at Apple), Aldo Hoeben
(the maker of SPi-V), Thomas Rauscher (Pano2QTVR) and others. I am
confident that if work on the FreePV codebase becomes urgent - either
toward integration in a mainstream media player or toward adding support
for features such as sprites and wiring - there will be enough
contributions from interested media producers to finance a bounty or
student internship similar to Google's Summer of Code.
In the meantime, it is very useable and useful, as this flickr
screenshot shows, it even runs on the Asus EEE
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/36383814@N00/2307900843/> and it is
smoother in panning than any current Flash based solution.
> apple seems like a hunter
> that has shot a deer but doesn't have the huevos to put it out of its
> misery. Maybe that's because they are planning to bring it back to life?
It's finance and business strategy. Leaving options open is more
valuable than closing things down, particularly when leaving the option
open does not cost much.
Yuv
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