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Originally Posted by Hobbes
I'm not so sure about that. They're up to 4.8 already,
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What does that have to do with anything?
After 4.9 comes 4.10, then 4.11. This isn't a decimal number.
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and they've got to maintain pre-Tiger and Windows compatability...
What would CodeAudio as opposed to QuickTime offer the user? (Honest question. I have no idea.)
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Incredibly low latency, less CPU use, less chances for stutter, etc.
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I suspect iTunes 5 will have some interesting and stylish new features. A smart rating system would be brilliant. Hierarchical playlists (done in some clean, not-too-confusing Apple way, e.g. "collections") is a given. A way to download liner notes would be enormously appreciated. And a redesigned interface with a dedicated full-height pane to better show album art + album info (esp. with the increasing numbers of letterbox-sized screens) would be great -- though I'm not counting on Apple to mess with success in this dept.
The big addition to the ITMS would be user ratings -- and a link-up to album and band information to something better than, ugh, Muse (too bad AMG's AllMusic is so Windows-friendly.  )
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Windows compatibility will be interesting when they move to CoreAudio. QuickTime only *now* is getting the cross-platform support that it should have had all along, so keeping it cross-platform is a must. How that will happen, I have no idea.
Given Apple's wonderful execution of graceful fallback for new technologies though (if the GPU can't handle a certain new tech, fallback to a software renderer on the CPU, etc), I suspect that QT7 will simply be more powerful on the Mac. The same files will playback on the Windows machines, the same codecs will be supported, etc, etc, etc, but it just may not have quite the performance for intensive content *creation* oriented tasks. Since this is Apple's bread and butter, it makes sense for them to make that the best they can on their side.
QT7 will be the same API on both (all?) platforms, but have different performance capabilities on the different hardware. Core* already has quite a bit of graceful fallback in place, has finally ditched the last of the legacy Toolbox, is finally thread-safe and re-entrant, etc, etc, etc. Basically, it's good to go for cross-platform support as the underlying guts of a new QT7 API suite.