Re:Apple's trouble with TV
by jsz0 on Thursday September 02, 2010 @05:09PM
(#1657685)
It's a very fine line for Apple. Supporting piracy-centric formats is a big stamp of approval which will hurt their ability to put together legitimate content deals. I'm puzzled why the piracy groups don't just adopt MP4/H264 as a standard distribution format. That would solve the problem and you get the added bonus of having metadata. One of the long standing problems of supporting the AVI container in a database driven UI is you don't have any metadata to work with.
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If supporting "piracy-centric formats" were a turn-off to content providers, wouldn't the same thing have happened with the iPod, which support everyone's favorite piracy format, the mp3? Granted, the tv and movie studios are in a much stronger negotiating position than the record labels, but I don't think that would be a sticking point for them. I'd guess that Apple is pushing a single format for the same reason they do with their mobile devices - hardware decoding.
Didn't stop Microsoft from including DivX support on xbox360, and they have a wider range of content providers. At issue here is the legitimacy of Apple as content provider, not others.
I remember they took their time to add DivX support though. A couple of years maybe. And they still haven't released web browsing, which i'd find useful
A quick google search points to mkv being used by anime fansubbing groups due to ease of putting multiple streams in one container, and the ease of using any audio and video codec you choose. Then it spread. That and and the fact mp4 doesn't support the ac3 codec and that tools used to make mkv files tend to be better and don't suffer from audio being out of sync with the video problems as much.