Record and Reverie

Well, it started before 1.0 was even released. We started looking at methods to optimize the routines within Perian to run even faster. The road has been a bit of a long one. Now, we are in a private beta. The beta has been opened to those who have donated to the project as well as personal friends of developers. We often get the question as to why we limited the beta to donators. I find more often than not that such people are the kind who think they deserve something to which they have no right to have (see Open Source Attitudes). The reason we did this is simple. We didn’t want the beta to be fully public, but we wanted more testers. Those who have donated have already shown they use and care about the project, so they are a natural choice.

Along they way, Apple decided to break things with Quicktime 7.3. I have filed these with Apple, and one of which is still open without any resolution. This one, bug ID 5594478, is particularly annoying.Open anything with an AC-3 track in it, that has more than 2 channels, and it will come through in stereo only. Change the id of the codec to something other than ‘ac-3’ and everything works flawlessly. I filled this bug report over 2 months ago, and about 2 weeks later I get a response stating that QT has never been able to decode multi-channel AC3 audio. Guess Apple is suffering from the NIH (not invented here) syndrome where nothing exists outside of what Apple makes. Then QT 7.4 comes out, and fixes nothing. Apple, this is your fault, you are in violation of your own design principles, you need to fix it. So, in the mean time, I ask everyone to file bug reports with apple, use the above id number as a reference, and get on their case to do their jobs.

Anyway, the beta is proceeding well. There are a few issues we have yet to resolve, but they are minor, and all seem to be Apple’s fault.

Tags: Perian