Live data from Hacker News

Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

apple.com

91–100 of 397 posts

Re: Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

#91
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, still, for a company that tries to make everything "simple and beautiful", why don't their video streams just work everywhere out of the box? That is the question.

What Apple's live streaming does, is in a CDN friendly way dynamically adjust the bandwidth going to a stream consumer. It's a great invention and there's no reason other people haven't adopted it. It's not being proprietary, it's simply being smart, because it's not trivial to do this kind of broadcast on the internet. Here's the reality of video, and this goes for a lot of things that Apple makes "simple and beauti…

The thing is that any cable company in the US and Canada that streams content to their customers via the Internet is using adaptive bitrate streaming either using HTTP Live Streaming, MPEG DASH, HTTP Dynamic Streaming, or Microsoft Smooth Streaming. It is far from impossible.

Re: Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

#93
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s, they've done a great deal to make it better, first for CD Roms and in a proprietary fashion. But when the net came around they opened up their proprietary format to become a standard-- the Mpeg4 file format is the old MOV format. They've also proposed a lot of improvements along these lines for other people to adopt. Like Bonj…

What, what? YouTube has been doing an HTML5 based web player for quite some time now[1], and I believe it supports FLV video as well, though I can't find a reference for that. [1] https://www.youtube.com/html5?gl=CA

I have uninstalled Flash from my system. A great many videos on YouTube give me the "you need the latest flash player to watch this video" error.

Yes, several years ago, I was getting MP4 video, and today, a portion (say %30-%40) just launch with MP4. But most of the time I get the "you need flash".

Re: Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

#94
post #75

Who wants to see the mac mini revived? ;)

Apple has a pattern before keynotes where they push out the less glamorous products. They keep them ready to go in the keynote in case something happens with a glamorous announcement they have filler. But when they are confident that they can announce the next iPhone, or whatever, they push out the minor rev of the iMac or whatever. I'm worried. This is the machine I want to buy next. A modern mac mini would be ideal…

Or they decided to skip Haswell, and are now waiting on Broadwell, which is substantially delayed. I'd say a Mini early next year might be a good bet.

Re: Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

#95
post #49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably use https://developer.apple.com/streaming/ , an HTTP streaming mechanism that's implemented by Safari that didn't get adopted by any other browser.

Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s, they've done a great deal to make it better, first for CD Roms and in a proprietary fashion. But when the net came around they opened up their proprietary format to become a standard-- the Mpeg4 file format is the old MOV format. They've also proposed a lot of improvements along these lines for other people to adopt. Like Bonj…

None of those things are open standards. Both Mpeg4 and "Bonjour" require a licence to utilise. Maybe that answers your question, people don't want to pay Apple oodles of money?

> Frankly, I think its appalling that youtube, for instance, is still running on flash.

Everyone can turn on HTML5 for YouTube if they wish. They offer both. They give you the choice, the default is Flash (but Flash still has the widest support on older platforms).

> Why I can't I access all the videos over MP4?

Because people would have to pay licensing fees several times for the same stream (e.g. sender and receiver both have to pay $$$, sometimes the sender, browser vendor AND OS vendor have to pay $$$).

> Meanwhile these competitors rush to copy everything else Apple does.

And Apple copies everything their competitors do also. Just look at iOS 8, that was just copying some of the best features from their competition (not that I blame them, they were right to do so).

The new keyboard (Android), third party keyboards (Android), "Handoff" (everyone else), Spotlight web-search (everyone else), etc.

Apple hasn't done anything original since Jobs died.

Re: Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

#96
post #49
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably use https://developer.apple.com/streaming/ , an HTTP streaming mechanism that's implemented by Safari that didn't get adopted by any other browser.

Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s, they've done a great deal to make it better, first for CD Roms and in a proprietary fashion. But when the net came around they opened up their proprietary format to become a standard-- the Mpeg4 file format is the old MOV format. They've also proposed a lot of improvements along these lines for other people to adopt. Like Bonj…

> Ever since Apple originated consumer computer video with Quicktime back in the early 1990s

I think that honor befalls the ITU with their H.261. It's only a few years difference and it definitely was never as wide spread as Quicktime but that's the first format that I remember that actually worked. It never succeeded on the web though there were a couple of companies that tried to do this using so called browser plug-ins.

Live streaming is mostly the domain of RTMP these days, HTTP doesn't lend itself well to live (but works just fine for streaming stored content).

As for why browsers don't all do MP4, you could ask why browsers do not natively support RTMP, that would solve the whole problem in one go.

Re: Apple – Live – September 2014 Special Event

#98
post #3

Call me dull, but I'm looking forward for a new iMac 27". Apple recently renewed the 21" version, but I'm just waiting for a new 27" to come out.

The new iMac 27" should have a nice 5120x2880 screen. That would sure justify the hype. But I bet we'll just get a 4.7" iPhone, Apple catching up to where Samsung has been for three long years now with a medium sized phone instead of a tiny chiclet. (I love the chiclet, but bigger would be better.) And we'll probably get another lousy "smart" watch that needs charging every day and doesn't do anything you can't do by…

Do you think Apple's been desperately saying to itself for the past 3 years "gee, I wish we had the technology to make a larger phone!"
Post reply on HN