Throwing Rotten Apples

I've been an apple user for many years. Well, just to be clear, I am a PC user and Mac user as well. But something happened the other day that really shook my confidence in Apple as a company.

Apple has a product called QuickTime (QT) which has 3 different aspects; First of all it's a file format for video, secondly its a program, a video player that can run on Mac or Windows, and lastly its part of the software infrastructure on a Mac OSX computer, its how mac handles video in general.

If you've ever tried to play back a quicktime mov file on windows, it looks like crap even if the original file was high quality and played perfectly on the mac. Now, I get this. This is mac trying desparately to hang on to the illusion that its system is better than the PC and Windows. I've come to accept this as a normal part of life. I asked Apples help-desk about this many years ago and they patted me on the head and patiently explained that its just the way mac hardware process video; its just different than the way windows handles it, so their quicktime files can't play correctly on windows. Its windows fault!

Recently I needed to create a Windows Media Video version of a 3 hour long video that was edited on a Mac. On the Mac, I tried exporting an AVI file (using QT conversion) which would have worked perfectly with Windows Media Encoder. Unfortunately, the AVI file was somehow defective and unreadable when I tried to open it on the PC. Hmmmm.... I thought to myself. I then exported the Quicktime MOV file which, hey... its looks crappy when played on the PC but I'm only going to convert it to WMV format anyways. I tried to compress it using the very highest quality settings and it took 60 hours to complete the conversion.

After it was complete, I tried to play it back and it looked completely crappy. I was shocked. I used the highest quality settings. I used to 2 pass variable bit rate encoding. I waited 60 hours!! It should look exactly like the original. Then I realized... it did look excatly like the crappy way all QT files play back on the PC. You see, they didn't just rig the QT player to make their files look crappy, they purposefully screwed up the codec so you can't transcode it on the PC either.

This experience put me in mind of what the Mac help-desk guy had told me all those years earlier. About how macs are just built different and its not possible for QT video to play back properly on PC hardware. Well now wait a minute... Macs now run on the SAME exact hardware, the same graphics cards as we use in PCs. The fact that QT still plays back poorly on the PC prooves that this is not the result of a hardware difference but is in fact the result of a choice by Apple not to play fairly. This is in fact EXACTLY the same kind of thing Microsoft was taken to task over, unfair competitive practices.

I'm furious with Apple right now. I left some "feedback" for the QT team. Don't be surprised guys if you find a burning bag of poo on your doorstep.