Interesting Job Posting at Apple.com

jared

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.

The part in bold made me think one thing: video conferencing in iChat

overhope

Quicktime Extreme?

the general

Actually those qualifications could be for just about any video app. idvd, ichat, quicktime, imovie,ect.even though Imovie doesnt use compression. usuallyif you are dealing with digital video that is something they should know.

overhope

Quicktime provides underlying video and (to an extent) graphics-handling capability to the OS, and allows any application to call upon whatever a/v resources it requires, which is what iDVD, iMovie, iTunes and Final Cut do.

eugene

Yay H.264, which QuickTime doesn't currently use...and isn't yet rolled into MPEG-4...

placebo

I was just wondering, how does your Mac display that pulsing grey circle, (the one in Jaguar) at startup, when the system isn't even a quarter booted yet? 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? Is this circle a quicktime movie, or something radically different? I'm just curious.\

paul

its just a series of images no? it shouldn't be that hard to code into the first part of boot up...

eugene

Quote:

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

costique

Quote:

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.

chucker

Quote:

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?

overhope

Any images displayed prior to a desktop picture (ie, the login background or your own if you login automatically) are coming straight from the bootX file (which is like a ROM, but held on the hard drive).



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).

placebo

Thanks. I am now only slightly confused.

wmf

Since Apple's H.264 codec is coming in a few months (NAB? WWDC?), I'm guessing it's already pretty far along in development. But if you're Apple you can never have too many codec engineers.