I've never quite understood why the resistance to the various Ogg formats?
My guess is that because there's no support for Digital Restrictions Management. Apple has already widely deployed software and devices that can play restricted h.264, and that's what the media companies that produce the content "want". (Of course, I never watch "media-company content" on Youtube. I doubt anyone whose videos I watch on Youtube would want Restriction Management on their files.)
Incidentally, all of the music I've bought recently has been in FLAC format. Seems like everyone I listen to offers it in addition to mp3s.
(It's just video-producers that think I am going to pay them $2 for a TV show I can't watch on my portable device. Haha, fat chance.)
I find it interesting that you can now buy music in FLAC format (from well known digital pioneers such as Metallica!) yet you can't play them on your Apple devices, instead they push their own home grown format, which they don't seem to licence widely and so generally undermine the whole concept of lossless audio.
Kind of shows up their stance of we want to use the best and most widespread format (as does the crappiness of their H.264 encoder compared with the x264 encoder that they could just adopt).
They never made any official announcement, but there were reports of Apple employees claiming that the ever handy bogeyman of patents were preventing them implementing FLAC.
Shortly after they implemented their own ALAC (note that's the exact same name with Free replaced with Apple) which reverse engineering showed to be built with the exact same technology they claimed was under a patent cloud with a few extra bits which were actively avoided by FLAC because of patent worries.
Having experienced that, and been quite disappointed as an Apple fan and owner, I can't take their stance of H.264 seriously.
Well it's lossless, so you can transcode it without worry. I'm not sure if you can encode it without Quicktime, but decoder support is widely implemented.
Apple originally developed ALAC for their AirTunes WiFi remote-speaker system. It supports low-latency streaming, and seeking works a lot better than with FLAC in every player I've used. FLAC's pointlessly-special container format suffers from the same screwy metadata problems as the other ogg formats: Apple wanted it in a standard mov/mp4 container.
The reverse engineered codec library may be supported in all the usual software players that handle everything, but I've never seen hardware support from anything other than iPods, iPhones or Airport Expresses (all of which I own) and this is apparently because of Apple's refusal to licence it. FLAC is of course widely implemented:
I find it surprising that the independently developed FLAC codec would suffer from the same problems as the Ogg container, unless you're talking about the slightly nonstandard FLAC in Ogg approach.
But if Apple really re-implemented a lookalike lossless format because they couldn't figure out any other way to put it in a .mov container then I think we're agreed that their engineering priorities around this issue are all messed up.
FLAC's standard container format is not Ogg. You can put FLAC in an Ogg container, but it's rather uncommon and the FLAC FAQ recommends against it. (Not because it will mess anything up, but rather because it is pointless.)
FLAC's container format supports arbitrary seekpoints, but it seems many encoders do not add them. Add them and a seek is a constant-time operation.
Though I've never seen a FLAC file with any metadata at all in the wild: it's always in the filename and accompanying text files. I would end up massaging the metadata into the standard mp4 fields when I transcoded to ALAC.
In practice when I've tried seeking in a FLAC file, I usually get a short pause followed by a loud click, and then the timecode is usually wrong or missing entirely. Maybe none of the files had seekpoint data, or the player/decoder implementations I used didn't support them. ALAC always worked perfectly.
My guess is that because there's no support for Digital Restrictions Management. Apple has already widely deployed software and devices that can play restricted h.264, and that's what the media companies that produce the content "want". (Of course, I never watch "media-company content" on Youtube. I doubt anyone whose videos I watch on Youtube would want Restriction Management on their files.)
Incidentally, all of the music I've bought recently has been in FLAC format. Seems like everyone I listen to offers it in addition to mp3s.
(It's just video-producers that think I am going to pay them $2 for a TV show I can't watch on my portable device. Haha, fat chance.)