> Then at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June of 2003, along with the G5 processor and OS X 10.3 panther, Apple announced "iChat AV".<p>This is wonderful. I love that people are still using this!<p>I worked on iChat AV video. We also added 4-way video conferencing with H.264 support in 2004. Really did feel cutting edge back then. Lots of all-nighters in those days, hand-writing altivec and hand-optimizing h.264 to work on iMacs and iBooks that didn’t have simd..
This is incredible and thank you for the reply. My friend and I are obsessed with computing history and this time period was especially fun for the both of us. Thank you for being a contributor to it.<p>I'm curious, would you be open to talking about your experience on a podcast with us? <a href="https://forkbombpodcast.com/" rel="nofollow">https://forkbombpodcast.com/</a> It's noncommercial, no ads, and is just for fun.<p>If not, I'd love to know more here. You all must of been really proud of what you built.
I really love HN!<p>Thank you for working on this. You added so much enjoyment to using AIM on an eMac circa that time. People talk fondly of their 90's/80's computing experience, but this was mine. It really was a magical time...
I was a teenager at the time and would watch all of Apple's keynotes. I remember them making a big deal for a while about H.264 support. It's very cool to get a glimpse of the context where engineers like yourself were likely proud of your work, and I'm glad that it was shown through the way that Apple talked about it.
I remember Jobs promising it would be released as an open standard. What happened behind the scenes to prevent that occurring?
Assuming you're thinking of FaceTime, I remember there being a patent lawsuit shortly after launch that apparently lasted a couple years: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114</a><p>By that time, not only was Android looking much more competitive, but FaceTime evidently demonstrated to be a massive hit that became very powerful for Apple's branding.<p>I also read that FaceTime eventually went from P2P to centralized servers (maybe in response to the lawsuit?), which of course is antithetical to the premise of being open.<p>Lastly, just speculating, but I imagine Steve Jobs had to have been a strong advocate for making it an open standard, if not the driving force. It makes sense that the promise would have fizzled out by the time the lawsuit was over, a year after his death.
He also said the same thing about FaceTime in 2010
I was not aware of this.
Having to optimise for three very different microarchitectures with the G3 (short narrow pipeline, no AltiVec, small caches), G4 (short wide pipeline, focus on in-order AltiVec, useful OoO otherwise, large L2 yet memory bandwidth starved), and G5 (long and wide pipeline, focus on super-scalar OoO, AltiVec just glued on, more memory bandwidth) must have been "fun".<p>How many variants of the codecs did you have to implement to make it work?
And Intel! We shipped QuickTime for windows, and then later launched intel-based macs. That was a lot of work to optimize for too! Lots of nights and weekends porting and optimizing for little-endian byte order and a completely different simd instruction set. Porting QT from OS9 to OS X was another major transition. It <i>was</i> fun though :)