Interesting Job Posting at Apple.com
Quote:
Title: Video CODEC Engineer
Req. ID: 1957672
Location: Santa Clara Valley, California
Country: United States
We are seeking a highly skilled and innovative engineer who will work on cutting edge video codec technologies. We're looking for a team player with demonstrated success in delivering products.
The ideal candidate will have a solid foundation in video compression and signal processing and a track record of innovation in codec algorithm development and implementation. Excellent C coding skills, and code optimization skills are a must. Experience with codecs like MPEG, H.263, H.264 or wavelets is desirable.
Title: Video CODEC Engineer
Req. ID: 1957672
Location: Santa Clara Valley, California
Country: United States
We are seeking a highly skilled and innovative engineer who will work on cutting edge video codec technologies. We're looking for a team player with demonstrated success in delivering products.
The ideal candidate will have a solid foundation in video compression and signal processing and a track record of innovation in codec algorithm development and implementation. Excellent C coding skills, and code optimization skills are a must. Experience with codecs like MPEG, H.263, H.264 or wavelets is desirable.
The part in bold made me think one thing: video conferencing in iChat
Comments
Originally posted by Paul
its just a series of images no? it shouldn't be that hard to code into the first part of boot up...
I'm not sure if it's a series of images. It's a single 'animated' TIFF IIRC
Originally posted by Eugene
I'm not sure if it's a series of images. It's a single 'animated' TIFF IIRC
What is 'animated TIFF'? There is only animated GIF, which is a set of layers/frames. Though TIFF supports layers, it's a headache to extract them before anything is booted.
In fact, the boot-time spinning indicator is in ROM file. Probably, hard-coded just like the grey apple.
Originally posted by Placebo
This got me thinking about, if this can happen, why not have a machine that you can, say, see whether you have mail or not, before the computer even boots?
Um, because that would require access to the internet and to the disk, during startup?
They're raw bitmap images written in hex and dealt with entirely within hardware, so there's no need for Quicktime or Quartz.
Animating them is a simple matter of dumping one after another onto the graphics system, like a flick book (which is all an animated GIF does, except for the fact that the GIF specification includes this behaviour and uses the higher-level display software).