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Re: PTViewer etc. Re: State of Quicktime VR


On Mar 29, 2008, at 9:25 AM, Paul Fretheim wrote:
Have you had a chance to see Director 11 yet? It is being released this week. It will be exciting to discover what support it has for VR. I would expect that it will at least support Flash VR, but the Adobe web site is vague about what new multimedia formats version 11 is going to support. They do specify that it will allow import for Flash video formats.

I will be very interested to see if it allows scripting via Lingo of the Flash video actions.

I've never done Director-Flash integration (always one or the other, and no Director for 5 years now) but if Director can embed and communicate with a SWF via ActionScript then I can't see why this wouldn't be possible; I doubt the majority of engineers at Adobe are even aware of "Flash VR" but the great thing about using Flash is no one needs to be - unlike Quicktime VR, which requires unique support within Quicktime, Flash VR is just built up from the primitive tools that everything else in Flash is built on - ActionScript, bitmap images, etc. This also means "Flash VR" is much more future-proof than Quicktime VR - Adobe doesn't have to "support" it, they just need to support the basic Flash platform and third-party developers do the rest; whereas Quicktime VR (and most other technologies in Quicktime) does quite depend on Apple for explicit support. If Apple stopped supporting QTVR playback tomorrow with a new QT update, we'd be dead in the water with nothing to be done about.

This is a key difference between Quicktime and Flash, both as products and technology platforms; Quicktime content creators depend on Apple for almost everything, and Apple provides a huge toolbox (lots of codecs, components like QTVR, etc) which we hope keeps growing, but as we've seen Apple is capable of occasionally taking away from Quicktime as well. Flash content creators are given a much smaller, more flexible toolbox but with the tools to make it do what they want - mainly, they have ActionScript. Just the presence of ActionScript in Flash without anything comparable in Quicktime is 90% of this difference; if we had an easy, core way of scripting the internals of Quicktime's runtime , we wouldn't even have to ask Apple for support for QuicktimeVR - we'd build it ourselves. This is what LiveStagePro promised at one point, but it was always sad that it had to come from a third-party.
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