QuickTime
QuickTime is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built-into macOS, and was formerly available for Windows.
QuickTime was created in 1991, when the concept of playing digital video directly on computers was "groundbreaking." QuickTime could embed a number of advanced media types, including panoramic images and Adobe Flash. Over the 1990s, QuickTime became a dominant standard for digital multimedia, as it was integrated into many websites, applications, and video games, and adopted by professional filmmakers. The QuickTime File Format became the basis for the MPEG-4 standard. During its heyday, QuickTime was notably used to create the innovative Myst and Xplora1 video games, and to exclusively distribute movie trailers for several Star Wars movies. QuickTime could support additional codecs through plug-ins, for example with Perian.
As operating systems and browsers gained support for MPEG-4 and subsequent standards like H.264, the need for a cross-platform version of QuickTime diminished, and Apple discontinued the Windows version of QuickTime in 2016. In Mac OS X Snow Leopard, QuickTime 7 was discontinued in favor of QuickTime Player X, which abandoned the aging QuickTime framework in favor of the AVFoundation framework. QuickTime Player X does not support video editing or plug-ins for additional codec support. macOS Catalina dropped support for all 32-bit applications, including the QTKit framework and the old QuickTime 7.
Overview
QuickTime is bundled with macOS. QuickTime for Microsoft Windows was downloadable as a standalone installation, and was bundled with Apple's iTunes before iTunes 10.5, but is no longer supported and therefore security vulnerabilities will no longer be patched. Already, at the time of the Windows version's discontinuation, two such zero-day vulnerabilities were identified and publicly disclosed by Trend Micro; consequently, Trend Micro strongly advised users to uninstall the product from Windows systems.Software development kits for QuickTime are available to the public with an Apple Developer Connection subscription.
It is available free of charge for both macOS operating systems. There are some other free player applications that rely on the QuickTime framework, providing features not available in the basic QuickTime Player. For example, iTunes can export audio in WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless. In addition, macOS has a simple AppleScript that can be used to play a movie in full-screen mode, but since version 7.2 full-screen viewing is now supported in the non-Pro version.
QuickTime framework
The QuickTime framework provides the following:The QuickTime framework functioned as a general-purpose multimedia abstraction layer within Apple's operating systems, providing a unified architecture for time-based media. Rather than being limited to a single file format or codec, QuickTime was designed to manage synchronized audio, video, text, and interactive elements through a modular component system. This design allowed media data to be edited non-destructively and referenced externally, which made the framework particularly well suited for professional video editing and multimedia authoring workflows.
- Encoding and transcoding video and audio from one format to another. Command-line utilities afconvert, avconvert and qtmodernizer are provided with macOS for power users.
- Decoding video and audio, then sending the decoded stream to the graphics or audio subsystem for playback. In macOS, QuickTime sends video playback to the Quartz Extreme Compositor.
- A "component" plug-in architecture for supporting additional 3rd-party codecs.
Although QuickTime was available on both macOS and Microsoft Windows, the two implementations differed in scope and integration. On macOS, QuickTime was deeply integrated with system graphics, audio, and scripting technologies, and later served as the foundation for higher-level frameworks such as QTKit and AVFoundation. On Windows, QuickTime provided a subset of the API primarily focused on media playback and basic authoring, and relied on technologies such as COM and ActiveX for application integration. Over time, platform divergence and native support for MPEG-4 and H.264 reduced the practical importance of QuickTime as a cross-platform framework.
Due to macOS Mojave being the last version to include support for 32-bit APIs and Apple's plans to drop 32-bit application support in future macOS releases, many codecs will no longer be supported in newer macOS releases, starting with macOS Catalina, which was released on October 7, 2019.
As of Mac OS X Lion, the underlying media framework for QuickTime, QTKit, was deprecated in favor of a newer graphics framework, AVFoundation, and completely discontinued as of macOS Catalina.
Windows
PictureViewer is a component of QuickTime for Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 operating systems. It is used to view picture files from the still image formats that QuickTime supports. In macOS, it is replaced by Preview.Irix
A version of QuickTime for the Irix operating system running on SGI hardware with MIPS processors was developed in the mid-1990s but never released.QuickTime Player
QuickTime Player served as the primary user-facing application for the QuickTime architecture, providing playback and basic media inspection capabilities for QuickTime movies and supported formats. Beyond local playback, the player played a significant role in the distribution of digital video during the 1990s and early 2000s, including interactive CD-ROM titles, embedded web video, and downloadable movie trailers. Its close integration with the QuickTime framework allowed it to act as both a reference implementation and a general-purpose media viewer for end users.QuickTime 7 Pro
QuickTime Player 7 is limited to only basic playback operations unless a QuickTime Pro license key is purchased from Apple. Until Catalina, Apple's professional applications included a QuickTime Pro license. Pro keys are specific to the major version of QuickTime for which they are purchased and unlock additional features of the QuickTime Player application on macOS or Windows. The Pro key does not require any additional downloads; entering the registration code immediately unlocks the hidden features.QuickTime 7 is still available for download from Apple, but as of mid-2016, Apple stopped selling registration keys for the Pro version.
Features enabled by the Pro license include, but are not limited to:
- 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 to any of the codecs supported by QuickTime. QuickTime 7 includes presets for exporting video to a video-capable iPod, Apple TV, and the iPhone.
- Saving existing QuickTime movies from the web directly to a hard disk drive. This is often, but not always, either hidden or intentionally blocked in the standard mode. Two options exist for saving movies from a web browser:
- * Save as source – This option will save the embedded video in its original format.
- * Save as QuickTime movie – This option will save the embedded video in a.mov file format no matter what the original container is/was.
QuickTime Player X
Mac OS X Lion and later also include QuickTime X. No installer for QuickTime 7 is included with these software packages, but users can download the QuickTime 7 installer from the site. QuickTime X on later versions of macOS support cut, copy and paste functions similarly to the way QuickTime 7 Pro did; the interface has been significantly modified to simplify these operations, however.
On September 24, 2018, Apple ended support for QuickTime 7 and QuickTime Pro, and updated many download and support pages on their website to state that QuickTime 7 "will not be compatible with future macOS releases."
File formats
The native file format for QuickTime video, QuickTime File Format, specifies a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text. Each track either contains a digitally encoded media stream or a data reference to the media stream located in another file. 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.Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively include AIFF, WAV, DV-DIF, MP3, and MPEG program stream. With additional QuickTime Components, it can also support ASF, DivX Media Format, Flash Video, Matroska, Ogg, and many others.
QuickTime and MPEG-4
On February 11, 1998, the ISO approved the QuickTime file format as the basis of the MPEG‑4 file format. The MPEG-4 file format specification was created on the basis of the QuickTime format specification published in 2001. The MP4 file format was published in 2001 as the revision of the MPEG-4 Part 1: Systems specification published in 1999. In 2003, the first version of MP4 format was revised and replaced by MPEG-4 Part 14: MP4 file format. The MP4 file format was generalized into the ISO Base Media File Format ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004, which defines a general structure for time-based media files. It in turn is used as the basis for other multimedia file formats.A list of all registered extensions for ISO Base Media File Format is published on the official registration authority website . This registration authority for code-points in "MP4 Family" files is Apple Computer Inc. and it is named in Annex D in MPEG-4 Part 12.
By 2000, MPEG-4 formats became industry standards, 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.