is a
Multimedia Framework developed by
Apple Inc. capable of handling various formats of
Digital Video ,
Media Clip s, sound, text, animation, music, and several types of
Interactive Panoramic Image s. Available for
Classic Mac OS ,
Mac OS X and
Microsoft Windows operating systems, it provides essential support for software packages including
ITunes ,
QuickTime Player (which can also serve as a
Helper Application for
Web Browser s to play media files that might otherwise fail to open) and
Safari .
The QuickTime technology consists of the following:
# The QuickTime Player application created by Apple, which is a
Media Player .
# The QuickTime framework, which provides a common set of
API s for encoding and decoding audio and video.
# The QuickTime Movie (.mov)
File Format , an openly-documented
Media Container .
QuickTime is integral to Mac OS X, as it was with earlier versions of
Mac OS . All Apple systems ship with QuickTime already installed, as it represents the core media framework for Mac OS X. QuickTime is optional for Windows systems, although many software applications require it. Apple bundles it with each
ITunes for Windows download, but it is also available as a stand-alone installation.
Software Development Kit s (SDKs) for QuickTime are available to the public with a free
Apple Developer Connection (ADC) subscription.
QuickTime is distributed free of charge, and includes the
QuickTime Player application. Some other free player applications that rely on the QuickTime framework provide features not available in the basic QuickTime Player. For example:
Any application can be written to access features provided by the QuickTime framework.
The included QuickTime Player is limited to only the most basic playback operations unless the user purchases a QuickTime Pro license key, which Apple sells for
US$ 29.95. Pro keys are specific to the major version of QuickTime for which they are purchased. The Pro key unlocks additional features of the QuickTime Player application on Mac OS X or Windows (although most of these can be accessed simply by using players, video editors or miscellaneous utilities from other sources).
3 Use of the Pro key does not entail any additional downloads.
Features enabled by the Pro license include, but are not limited to:
- New movie recordings from a FireWire , DV or ISight camera.
- Editing clips through the Cut, Copy and Paste functions, merging separate audio and video tracks, and freely placing the video tracks on a virtual canvas with the options of cropping and rotation.
- Saving and exporting ( Encoding ) to any of the Codecs supported by QuickTime. QuickTime 7 includes presets for exporting video to a video-capable IPod , AppleTV , and the IPhone .
- Saving existing QuickTime Movies (---.mov) from the web directly to a hard disk drive (HDD). (This is often, but not always, either hidden or intentionally blocked in the standard mode. A Download Manager can often work around this.)
The QuickTime framework provides the following:
- Encoding and Transcoding video and audio from one format to another.
- Decoding video and audio, then sending the decoded stream to the graphics or audio subsystem for playback. In Mac OS X, QuickTime sends video playback to the Quartz Extreme (OpenGL) Compositor .4
- A plug-in architecture for supporting additional codecs (such as DivX ).
The framework supports the following file types and codecs natively:
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- Apple Lossless
- Audio Interchange ( AIFF )
- Digital Audio: Audio CD - 16-bit ( CDDA ), 24-bit, 32-bit integer & floating point, and 64-bit floating point
- MIDI
- MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio (.mp3)
- MPEG-4 AAC Audio (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p)
- QDesign Music
- Qualcomm PureVoice ( QCELP )
- Sun AU Audio
- ULAW and ALAW Audio
- Waveform Audio ( WAV )
- 3GPP & 3GPP2 file formats
- AVI file format
- Bitmap ( BMP ) codec and file format
- DV file (DV NTSC/PAL and DVC Pro NTSC/PAL codecs)
- Flash & FlashPix files
- GIF and Animated GIF files
- H.261 , H.263 , and H.264 codecs
- JPEG, Photo JPEG, and JPEG-2000 codecs and file formats
- MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4 Video file formats and associated codecs (such as AVC )
- Quartz Composer Composition (.qtz, Mac OS X only)
- QuickTime Movie (.mov) and QTVR movies
- Sorenson Video 2 And 3 Codecs
- Other video codecs: Apple Video, Cinepak, Component Video, Graphics, and Planar RGB
- Other still image formats: PNG, TIFF, and TGA
- Cached information from
The QuickTime (.mov) file format functions as a
Multimedia Container File that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (for subtitles, for example). Each track either contains a digitally-encoded media stream (using a specific codec) or a data reference to the media stream located in another file. Tracks are maintained in a hierarchal data structure consisting of objects called atoms. An atom can be a parent to other atoms or it can contain media or edit data, but it cannot do both.
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The ability to contain abstract data references for the media data, and the separation of the media data from the media offsets and the track edit lists means that QuickTime is particularly suited for editing, as it is capable of importing and editing in place (without data copying). Other later-developed media container formats such as Microsoft's
Advanced Systems Format or the
Open Source Ogg and
Matroska containers lack this abstraction, and require all media data to be rewritten after editing.
Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively (to varying degrees) include AIFF, WAV, DV, MP3, and
MPEG-1 . With additional QuickTime Extensions, it can also support
Ogg ,
ASF ,
FLV ,
MKV ,
DivX Media Format , and others.
file, choose MPEG-4 in the Export dialog.]]
On
February 11 ,
1998 the
ISO approved the QuickTime file format as the basis of the
MPEG-4 Part 14 (
.mp4) container standard. By
2000 , MPEG-4 Part 14 became an industry standard, first appearing with support in QuickTime 6 in
2002 . Accordingly, the MPEG-4 container is designed to capture, edit,
Archive , and
Distribute media, unlike the simple file-as-stream approach of MPEG-1 and
MPEG-2 .
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QuickTime 6 added limited support for MPEG-4; specifically encoding and decoding using Simple Profile (SP). Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) features, like
B-frames , were unsupported (in contrast with, for example, encoders such as
XviD or
3ivx ). QuickTime 7 supports the H.264 encoder and decoder.
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Because both the MOV and MP4 containers can use the same MPEG-4 codecs, they are mostly interchangeable in a QuickTime-only environment. However, MP4, being an international standard, has more support. This is especially true on hardware devices, such as the
Sony PSP and various DVD players; on the software side, most
DirectShow /
Video For Windows codec packshttp://hellninjacommando.com/defilerpak/http://www.k-litecodecpack.com/ include an MP4 parser, but not one for MOV.
In QuickTime Pro's MPEG-4 Export dialog, an option called "Passthrough" allows a clean export to MP4 without affecting the audio or video streams. One recent discrepancy ushered in by QuickTime 7 is that the MOV file format now supports multichannel audio (used, for example, in the high-definition trailers on Apple's sitehttp://apple.com/trailers), while QuickTime's support for audio in the MP4 container is limited to stereo. Therefore multichannel audio must be re-encoded during MP4 export.
Apple released the first version of QuickTime on
December 2 ,
1991 as a
Multimedia add-on for
System Software 6 and later. The lead developer of QuickTime,
Bruce Leak , ran the first public demonstration at the May 1991
Worldwide Developers Conference , where he played Apple's famous
1984 TV Commercial on a Mac, at the time an astounding technological breakthrough.
Microsoft 's competing technology — Video for Windows — did not appear until November 1992.
That first version of QuickTime laid down the basic architecture which survives essentially unchanged today, including multiple movie tracks, extensible media type support, an open-ended file format, and a full complement of editing functions. The original video
Codec s included:
- the Apple Video codec (also known as "Road Pizza"), suited to normal live-action video
- the Animation codec, which used simple Run-length Encoding and better suited cartoon-type images with large areas of flat color
- the Graphics codec, optimized for 8-bit images, including ones that had undergone Dithering
The first commercial project produced using Quicktime 1.0 was the CD-ROM
From Alice to Ocean . The first publicly visible use of QuickTime was
Ben & Jerry's interactive factory tour (dubbed ''The Rik & Joe Show'' after its in-house developers). ''The Rik and Joe Show'' was demonstrated onstage at MacWorld in San Francisco when
John Sculley announced Quicktime.
Apple released QuickTime 1.5 for Mac OS in the latter part of 1992. This added the
SuperMac -developed Cinepak vector-quantization video codec (initially known as Compact Video), which managed the previously unheard-of feat of playing back video at 320×240 resolution at 30 frames per second on a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. It also added ''text'' tracks, which allowed for things like captioning, lyrics, etc., at very little addition to the size of a movie.
In an effort to increase the adoption of QuickTime, Apple contracted an outside company,
San Francisco Canyon Company , to port QuickTime to the Windows platform. Version 1.0 of QuickTime for Windows provided only a subset of the full QuickTime API, including only movie playback functions driven through the standard movie controller.
QuickTime 1.6.x came out the following year. Version 1.6.2 first incorporated the "QuickTime PowerPlug" which replaced some components with
PowerPC -native code when running on PowerPC Macs.
Apple released QuickTime 2.0 for Mac OS in February 1994 — the only version never released for free. It added support for music tracks, which contained the equivalent of
MIDI data and which could drive a sound-synthesis engine built into QuickTime itself (using a limited set of instrument sounds licensed from
Roland ), or any external MIDI-compatible hardware, thereby producing sounds using only small amounts of movie data.
Following
Bruce Leak 's departure to
Web TV the leadership of the QuickTime team was taken over by
Peter Hoddie .
QuickTime 2.0 for Windows appeared in November 1994 under the leadership of Paul Charlton. As part of the development effort for cross-platform QuickTime, Charlton and technical lead Michael Kellner ported a subset of the Macintosh Toolbox to Intel and other platforms (notably, MIPS and SGI Unix variants) as the enabling infrastructure for the QuickTime Media Layer (QTML) which was first demonstrated at the Apple WorldWide Developer Conference (
WWDC ) in May of 1996. The QTML later became the foundation for the Carbon API which allowed legacy Macintosh applications to run on the Darwin kernel in Mac OS X.
The next versions, 2.1 and 2.5, reverted to the previous model of giving QuickTime away for free. They improved the music support and added
Sprite tracks which allowed the creation of complex animations with the addition of little more than the static sprite images to the size of the movie. QuickTime 2.5 also fully integrated
QuickTime VR 2.0.1 into QuickTime as a QuickTime extension. On January 16, 1997, Apple released the QuickTime MPEG Extension (PPC only) as an add-on to QuickTime 2.5, which added software MPEG-1 playback capabilities to QuickTime.
The release of QuickTime 3.0 for Mac OS on
March 30 ,
1998 introduced the now-standard revenue model of releasing the software for free, but with additional features of the Apple-provided MoviePlayer application that end-users could only unlock by buying a QuickTime Pro
License code.
QuickTime 3.0 added support for graphics importer components that could read images from
GIF , JPEG,
TIFF and other file formats, and video output components which served primarily to export movie data via FireWire. Apple also licensed several third-party technologies for inclusion in QuickTime 3.0, including the
Sorenson Video codec for advanced video compression, the
QDesign Music codec for substantial audio compression, and the complete Roland Sound Canvas instrument set and GS Format extensions for improved playback of MIDI music files. It also added video ''effects'' which programmers could apply in real-time to video tracks. Some of these effects would even respond to mouse clicks by the user, as part of the new movie
Interaction support (known as ).
During the development cycle for QuickTime 3.0 part of the engineering team was working on a more advanced version of QuickTime to be known as or QTi. Although similar in concept to the wired movies feature released as part of QuickTime 3.0, QuickTime interactive was much more ambitious. It allowed any QuickTime movie to be a fully interactive and programmable container for media. A special track type was added that contained an interpreter for a custom programming language based on 68000
Assembly Language . This supported a comprehensive user interaction model for mouse and keyboard event handling based in part on the AML language from the
Apple Media Tool .
The QuickTime interactive movie was to have been the playback format for the next generation of
HyperCard authoring tool. Unfortunately both the QuickTime interactive and the HyperCard 3.0 projects were canceled in order to concentrate engineering resources on streaming support for QuickTime 4.0, and the projects were never released to the public.
Apple released QuickTime 4.0 on
June 8 ,
1999 9 for Mac OS 7.5.5 through 8.6 (later
Mac OS 9 ) and
Windows 95 ,
Windows 98 , and
Windows NT . Three minor updates (versions 4.0.1, 4.0.2, and 4.0.3) followed.
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It introduced features that most users now consider basic:
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- Graphics exporter components, which could write some of the same formats that the previously-introduced importers could read. (GIF support was omitted, possibly because of the LZW Patent .)
- Support for the QDesign Music 2 and MPEG-1 Layer 3 audio (MP3)
- QuickTime 4 was the first version to support Streaming . It was accompanied by the release of the free QuickTime Streaming Server version 1.0.
