Petteri Pyyny
12 May 2000 19:17
When all these propietary formats (Microsoft WM, Apple Quicktime and Real's RealVideo) have their annoying limitations for users' and service providers' perspective, there is an open standard available for streaming video content over the Internet.
Now National Cable Television Association gave their partial support for MPEG4 format which is specifically designed for broadband video streaming and downloading. Problem for cable providers is clear -- they want to make WebTVs and having billions of video and audio codecs in the set-top boxes is not possible while it's very possible (and unfortunately almost a must) in PC world. They want a clear one solution for this problem and they have decided that MPEG4 is the one.
For our core audience, MPEG4 is propably already a well-known format, specially it's hacked version dubbed as "DivX ;-)" which uses MPEG4 video with MP3 (MPEG1 audio layer III) audio. With this format, you can easily fit a movie with very-good-SVHS-quality in one regular CD-ROM.