Swil:

This is an issue for Squeeze and TMPGEnc to fix ASAP. It's absurd they haven't done so already.

Let's be fair. When most companies EOL a product,  they give you fair notice.  That Apple didn't caught everyone by surprise.  You need to give the other organizations a chace to catch up.

Absolutely ! APPLE took by "bad" surprise a lot of companies. Obviously it should not be at all easy for Avid to implement solutions to remove all resources from APPLE without losing in functionality.
As anyway MC does not work properly without QT, we must wait. Thank you in advance for work in progress Resolving.
(please in native x64 bits... Thanks! )

DStone:

Let's be fair. When most companies EOL a product,  they give you fair notice.  That Apple didn't caught everyone by surprise.  You need to give the other organizations a chace to catch up.

They've had years to implement MXF support and they haven't. QuickTime's EOL is a kick up the butt, but it's very late in the game.

DStone:

Swil:

This is an issue for Squeeze and TMPGEnc to fix ASAP. It's absurd they haven't done so already.

Let's be fair. When most companies EOL a product,  they give you fair notice.  That Apple didn't caught everyone by surprise.  You need to give the other organizations a chace to catch up.

When has Apple ever signposted anything?

I remember the Dance Avid had to do years back when new Apple systems didn't have enough slots for the boardsets so Avid had to go the external chassis extender route. Then guess what the next apple model did have enough slots. then the next didn't. A right game Apple played.

The lesson should have been don't relay on anything  from Apple. You just get burnt. As may have said the writing was plain to read on the wall.

There's a lot of misunderstanding here on how QuickTime works.

QuickTime is not a player, it's a framework, meaning it's a whole subsystem for handling video (a bit like DirectShow is for Windows).

When you use this framework as a developper, you create movie objects in memory. The .mov container is the file format used to "dump" those movie objects on disk.

QuickTime API has a lot of functions to allow graphic & movie editing/manipulation, color conversion, audio & video encoding/decoding, etc. As far as I know it has many more functions that all the other videos APIs I ever checked. It even have sprites, interactive menus, multilanguage and subtitle supports !

The API of course also offers a simple way to playout files on screen.

ALL the features of QuickTime are available for free on Windows when you install "QuickTime core components". It's this API that Media Composer relies on.

QuickTime Player, on the other hand, is a mere player using the QuickTime API to open and play videos. A lot of advanced features like editing, converting & exporting are not free in QuickTime Player, but you can perfectly make your own QuickTime Player with the exact same features because they are all available in the API. The dev site of Apple even have code snippets to make players with more features than the standard QuickTime Player! You can make a QuickTime Player that plays movies in fullscreen in a few lines without paying for the so-called "Pro" version of the standard player.
In other words, "QuickTime Pro" is Apple making you pay for the player, not the API.

So you may uninstall QuickTime Player or the QT web plugin (who's still using it btw?). But IMO the bugs are in the API, so as soon as you open a malicious .mov file from a software relying on QT API, you may get hit by the QT vulnerabilities.

Now about the QuickTime EOL.

No matter how I can think about it, it is NOT surprising and NOT unexpected. We just lied to ourselves thinking that Apple would continue to maintain QT on Windows.

First, for those who checked regularly on QT, the Windows Version is a port of the old QT7 framework that Apple has EOL'ed for some time on OSX. The new QT X is a completely new rewrite coming from iOS and has never been ported to Windows.

Secondly, the QT7 support on Windows has been a joke from some time. I use some open source tools using QuickTime and it's obvious there is a lot of unfixed bugs everywhere. You can use it to decode ProRes but not encode it, which is a shame since ProRes is a very convenient codec when making video files of any resolution/framerate without looking forever for a matching profile (the worst thing about DNxHD/VC-3 IMO). We use ProRes everytime we need to make tmp files from the consumer world, like mkv, flv, vob...
MPEG streams wrapped in .mov support has been dropped for sometime now. HDV wrapped in .mov (the standard FCP format for HDV) was never supported on QT Windows.

Etc.

So what now?

For us this is really bad news. All our archives (~100TB) are in .mov. Fortunately this is a documented format. But all our production is based on QuickTime framework, used by various projects, developped in-house from open source projects.

We could use another format like MXF. But so far this wrapper has caused us more issues than it solved. The lack of codecs available in MXF is the cause, and also the fact that it must be handled independently and equally by each software. Trust me this is a real pain in the neck. Never validated it for production here.

Someone said "ffmpeg". Okay, I use ffmpeg everyday, and what I can say is that it's really not industry-grade software. I know that a lot of companies are using it. We use it. But each version of ffmpeg/ffav might break compatibility or support (the interface is often changing, meaning that when it happens you get the new dll/exe and everything falls apart). From what I know from other companies ffmpeg is known as the "free tool that can do lots of things" but also the "free tool that you freeze and never touch again when it's working". As a matter of fact each tool I develop with ffmpeg has its own ffmpeg binary to avoid issues. How is that convenient? It is not.
Also, the fact that ffmpeg doesn't support interlaced video natively and can NOT decode properly any 4:2:0 interlaced video should ring a HUGE warning bell in your head.

My conclusion:

- The QT framework is old and buggy. But it is powerful. Right now, nothing can replace it now with the same level of features, stability, and available system-wide for every application.

- For those who still didn't understand it after the XServe RAID/XServe/FCP7 zero-day EOLs, Apple is not a company to be trusted anymore.

Pat Horridge:

don't rely on anything  from Apple

Uhm... ProRes anyone? Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Here: Introduction to QuickTime File Format Specification

All you have to do is write up a compatible API that implements the spec. and decode the media stream that you can drop in place of Apple's. Easy. (Yes, mild sarcasm is implied).

Redstone
We pay a license. We do not know how internally Avid and it matters little since all that interested us: it is that it works. Point bar! (In French).
It is useless to tell us what to do: It's AVID and others to give us a applicaion fully functioning! No ?
Your internal wars between moderators do not interest us!

jcfrance:

Your internal wars between moderators do not interest us!

War? There's no argument going on here. I'm afraid you're reading far too much into this. That was meant as a commentary on the state into which Apple has put many companies and developers.

So here's the real issue. Avid (along with many other companies) provides a software package for manipulating media. Some of the function for that software is developed by a 3rd party (Apple), who provides it for free so that the end user can read and write media in Apple's format. Apple decides to no longer support that software. Is Avid (or any other company) actually responsible for fixing it, or for making their software support Apple's now obsolete format?

Media Composer will still work without Quicktime. In other words, it's fully functioning. You simply cannot use import or export based on Quicktime. What is more, you don't have to stop using Quicktime if you choose. You simply have to be careful about not looking at media from untrusted sources (which was discussed below). In which case, nothing has changed and there's no loss of function at all.

So what's the right answer here? Should Avid (and Sorenson and Adobe and all the others) be responsible for fixing Apple's software or developing their own software for reading Apple's .MOV files?

No doubt, all the legal departments were told to "make steam".

 Hi Dave re:-(Media Composer will still work without Quicktime. In other words, it's fully functioning. You simply cannot use import or export based on Quicktime.)

Maybe this is a bigger issue than anyone is admitting, - here is a note from Squeeze today (quote) Squeeze for Windows must have QuickTime installed to function we are currently looking at several solutions and we will keep you updated(unquote).

Two questions :-

Why has this taken so long to surface ..?

Why update to Squeeze 11 if there is no immediate solution to a major problem ..?

Dropping support for old formats, that need to be updated by other companies, seems to be all the rage.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/security/26037/google-to-dump-flash-in-ads-from-june

Cyril Lambin:

Someone said "ffmpeg".

That someone was me Cyril. The reason for bringing it up is because it is the only viable alternative at this moment AFAIK. Yes, it is an open source project which lacks format compatibility, backwards compatibility and testing coordination any commercial product has (or should have) and this is where a 3rd party should step in to make it "industry grade". But who?

One thing you forgot to mention by the way is 1 huge advantage of ffmpeg. It's multithreading works and uses processor resources far better then quicktime ever did. Especially with the h264 formats this is visible

Cyril Lambin:

My conclusion:

- The QT framework is old and buggy. But it is powerful. Right now, nothing can replace it now with the same level of features, stability, and available system-wide for every application.

- For those who still didn't understand it after the XServe RAID/XServe/FCP7 zero-day EOLs, Apple is not a company to be trusted anymore.

Can't agree more. And what the best way forward is, I'm not sure. But the market needs an alternative. Question remains... what?

For those interested take a look at this KB article by Avid.

thanks for the link andrew!