QuickTime
QuickTime is a
multimedia technology developed by
Apple Computer, capable of handling various formats of
digital video,
media clips,
sound,
text,
animation,
music, and
immersive cylindrical and cubic
panoramic images.
The most recent version is 7.1.2 and is available for
Mac OS X. Version 7.1 is currently available for
Microsoft Windows.
The QuickTime technology has three major components:# the QuickTime
file format itself â€" openly documented and available for anyone to use royalty-free# a
media player which Apple makes available for free download on its website and bundles with each of its computers# s available for the
Macintosh and
Windows platforms. These kits allow people to develop their own software to manipulate QuickTime and other media files. These are not free.
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 â€"
Video for Windows â€" did not appear until November 1992.
QuickTime 1.x
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
codecs 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
ditheringApple 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 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.
QuickTime 2.x
Apple released QuickTime 2.0 for Mac OS in February 1994 â€" 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 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.
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.
QuickTime 3.x
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. It also included the advanced
Sorenson Video codec (licensed from
Sorenson Media), and the
QDesign Music codec for substantial audio compression. 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
wired movies).
QuickTime interactive
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
QuickTime interactive or QTi. Although similar in concept to the wired movies feature released as part of QT 3.0, QTi 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 QTi movie was to have been the playback format for the next generation of
HyperCard authoring tool. Unfortunately both the QTi 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.
QuickTime 4.x
Apple released QuickTime 4.0 for Mac OS on
June 8,
1999. This added
graphics exporter components which could write some of the same formats that the previously-introduced importers could read, though interestingly not GIF (possibly because of the
LZW patent). It added the improved
QDesign Music 2 codec and support for
streaming, alongside the release of the free
QuickTime Streaming Server.
QuickTime 4.1, released at the beginning of 2000, added support for movie files larger than 2 gigabytes on
Mac OS 9 and later, and dropped support for 68K Macs. Users gained the ability to control the QuickTime Player via
AppleScript.
QuickTime 5.x
QuickTime 5.0 for Mac OS appeared on
April 23,
2001. It added "
skins" to the QuickTime Player and
multiprocessor image compression support. The QuickTime VR component gained the ability to display cubic VR movies. Due to technical complications, the more advanced
Sorenson Video 3 codec was not introduced until the QuickTime 5.0.2 release on
July 1,
2001.
QuickTime 6.x
QuickTime 6.0 for Mac OS, released on
July 15,
2002, was a major update, introducing
MPEG-4 capabilities, including
MPEG-4 Part 2 video and
AAC.
MPEG-2 playback was available with the purchase (due to MPEG licensing fees) of an additional component.
| Updates to QuickTime 6 |
|---|
| Release Date | Version | Platforms | Features |
|---|
| July 15, 2002 | QuickTime 6.0 | Mac OS 8.6â€"Mac OS X, Windows | MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and AAC |
| January 14, 2003 | QuickTime 6.1 | Mac OS X | "Quality and performance enhancements" |
| March 31, 2003 | QuickTime 6.1 | Windows | Fix for CAN-2003-0168 security vulnerability |
| April 29, 2003 | QuickTime 6.2 | Mac OS X | Support for iTunes 4, enhanced AAC support |
| June 3, 2003 | QuickTime 6.3 | Mac OS X, Windows | 3GPP and AMR |
| October 16, 2003 | QuickTime 6.4 | Mac OS X, Windows | Pixlet codec, integrated 3GPP |
| December 18, 2003 | QuickTime 6.5 | Mac OS X, Windows | 3GPP2 and AMC mobile multimedia formats |
| April 28, 2004 | QuickTime 6.5.1 | Mac OS X, Windows | Apple Lossless |
| October 27, 2004 | QuickTime 6.5.2 | Mac OS X, Windows(the last version for Windows 98/Me) | Bug fixes, security updates, and
quality and performance enhancements |
| October 12, 2005 | QuickTime 6.5.3 | Mac OS X v10.2.8 | |
QuickTime 7.x
QuickTime 7 was released on
April 29 2005 with
Mac OS X v10.4 featuring complete
MPEG-4 compliance,
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec, live resizing, multi-channel audio, full-screen overlay, and support for interactive animations created with Apple's new tool
Quartz Composer. Version 7 was also released for
10.3.9.
On
June 6, Apple issued a preview release of QuickTime 7.0 for
Windows 2000 and
Windows XP. This was followed by "Public Preview 2" on
July 13, "Public Preview 3" on
August 14, and the first final release on
September 7 2005.
| Updates to QuickTime 7 |
|---|
| Release Date | Version | Platforms | Features |
|---|
| May 31, 2005 | QuickTime 7.0.1 | Mac OS X | Fix a security issue with the Quartz Composer plugin |
| July 15, 2005 | QuickTime 7.0.2 | Mac OS X | Bug fixes and compatibility enhancements |
| September 7, 2005 | QuickTime 7.0.2 | Windows 2000/XP | First non-preview release |
| October 12, 2005 | QuickTime 7.0.3 | Mac OS X & Windows 2000/XP | Streaming and H.264 bug fixes. Needed to support video purchases through iTunes Music Store. |
| October 29, 2005 | QuickTime 7.0.3.50 | Windows 2000/XP |
| January 10, 2006 | QuickTime 7.0.4 | Mac OS X & Windows 2000/XP | First Universal Binary version. Numerous bug fixes and H.264 performance improvements. |
| May 11, 2006 | QuickTime 7.1 | Mac OS X & Windows 2000/XP | Numerous bug fixes, support for iLife '06, and H.264 performance improvements |
| May 31, 2006 | QuickTime 7.1.1 | Mac OS X |
| June 28, 2006 | QuickTime 7.1.2 | Mac OS X | Addresses an issue previewing iDVD projects. |
A QuickTime file (*.mov) functions as a
multimedia container file that contains one or more
tracks, each of which store a particular type of data, such as
audio,
video,
effects, or
text (for subtitles, for example). Each track in turn contains
track media, either the digitally-encoded media stream (using a specific codec such as
Cinepak,
Sorenson codec,
MP3,
JPEG,
DivX, or
PNG) or a data reference to the media stored in another file or elsewhere on a network. It also has an "edit list" that indicates what parts of the media to use.
Internally, QuickTime files maintain this format as a tree-structure of "atoms", each of which uses a 4-byte
OSType identifier to determine its structure. An atom can be a parent to other atoms or it can contain data, but it cannot do both.
Apple's plans for
HyperCard 3.0 illustrate the versatility of QuickTime's file format. The designers of Hypercard 3.0 originally intended to store the equivalent of an entire HyperCard stack (similar in structure to a complete web site, with graphics, buttons and scripts) as a QuickTime interactive 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 (without data copying) other formats such as
AIFF,
DV,
MP3,
MPEG-1, and
AVI. Other later-developed media container formats such as Microsoft's
Advanced Streaming Format or the
open source Ogg and
Matroska containers lack this abstraction, and require all media data to be rewritten after editing.
QuickTime and MPEG-4
|
To create an MP4 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. Supporters of the move noted that QuickTime provided a good "life-cycle" format, well suited to
capture,
editing,
archiving,
distribution, and
playback (as opposed to the simple file-as-stream approach of
MPEG-1 and
MPEG-2, which does not mesh well with editing). Developers added MPEG-4 compatibility to QuickTime 6 in 2002. However, Apple delayed the release of this version for months in a dispute with the MPEG-4 licensing body, claiming that proposed license fees would constrain many users and content providers. Following a compromise, Apple released QuickTime 6 on
15 July 2002.
Profile Support
QuickTime 6 had limited support for MPEG-4 in that it could only encode and decode Simple Profile (SP). Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) features, like
B-frames, were unsupported, making QuickTime-encoded MPEG-4 files compare terribly with XviD and other full-featured encoders. QuickTime 7 decodes both MPEG-4 SP and ASP, though the encoder is still SP-only.
QuickTime 7's H.264 encoder is claimed to be Main Profile, but actually Baseline Profile plus 1 B-frame support, the decoder supports Baseline, Extended, and most of Main Profile [
1]. High Profile features are unsupported.
Container Benefits
|
Use Passthrough to change to the MP4 container without re-encoding the stream. |
Because both the MOV and
MP4 containers can utilize 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 packs [
2] [
3] 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 site[
4]), while MP4 is limited to stereo. Therefore multichannel audio must be re-encoded during MP4 export.
Apple releases official QuickTime media player software for Mac OS and Windows for free under the brand
QuickTime Player. (Earlier versions had been named
MoviePlayer.) The player also comes with a number of media-editing and media-creation features, but users have to unlock these by purchasing a key from Apple, turning the media player into
QuickTime Pro.
A number of companies utilize QuickTime for their software, for example:
* Apple's own media player,
iTunes, utilizes QuickTime for its audio and video playback features
* the
Encyclopædia Britannica on
DVD requires QuickTime to play movie
clips
*
iScreensaver Designer makes screensaver installers for Mac OS 8.6 through OS X and Windows 98 through XP, and builds from either platform to the other, demonstrating QuickTime's cross-platform versatility and stability
* many software installation
compact discs
Independent players for QuickTime 6 (MPEG-4) exist for many operating systems, and the
FFmpeg library even supports the Sorenson video compression format, as well as the
QDesign audio codec often used alongside it. Apple, however, has licensed Sorenson technology exclusively.
QuickTime Alternative, as the name implies, uses specific QuickTime libraries and an alternative media player to avoid a full QuickTime installation.
QuickTime Pro
QuickTime Pro is a paid version of Apple Computer's free QuickTime media player technology. The functions of QuickTime Pro can be enabled by typing in a Name and a Serial Number (which is purchased at the Apple Store) in the "Register" Menu of the standard QuickTime Player.
QuickTime Pro adds among other the following features to the standard QuickTime player:
* Full-screen playback (note:
full-screen playback can be enabled in the free Mac OS X version with AppleScript)
* Editing clips thru the Cut, Copy and Paste functions, merging separate audio and video tracks, freely placing the video tracks on a virtual canvas with the options of cropping and rotation.
* Exporting (
Encoding) videos opened in QuickTime to a wide variety of different video codecs (MPEG-4,
H.264 (only in QuickTime Pro 7), Animation, DV, mjpeg), still graphic formats (TIFF, PICT, JPEG), and Audio (WAV, AIFF, ACC).The full QuickTime Pro is included with
Final Cut Studio.
In Mac OS X, the "Pro-only" features are actually available from within the QuickTime framework, and the limitations in the free version apply only to the QuickTime Player application. Other software that uses the QuickTime framework can use the save/export features without the need for a license, e.g. some
video editing packages that rely on QuickTime for their export/import abilities do so by using the QuickTime framework, no matter if a Pro key is present or not, and iTunes and its audio encoders do not require the Pro license to work. Because of this, Apple has often been criticized for its decision to require Mac OS X users to buy a QuickTime Pro key to use certain Player features. [
5]
Developers can use the QuickTime
software development kit to develop multimedia applications for Mac or Windows with the
C programming language or with the
Java programming language.
QuickTime consists of two major subsystems: the
Movie Toolbox and the
Image Compression Manager. The Movie Toolbox consists of a general API for handling time-based data, while the Image Compression Manager provides services for dealing with compressed
raster data as produced by video and photo codecs.
QuickTime 7.0 introduced the QuickTime Kit (aka QTKit), a developer framework that is intended to replace previous APIs for
Cocoa developers. This framework is for Mac only, and exists as
Objective-C abstractions around a subset of the C interface.
QuickTime 7 Pro now offers support to export video files encoded in H.264 at 320×240 pixels to be viewed on the new fifth generation iPod.
*
List of media players*
Comparison of media players*
QuickTime VR*
Apple - QuickTime- Apple's official site
**
Download page*
Apple's QuickTime developer site*
Apple - QuickTime Version Availability*
QuickTime for Java*
Apple - QuickTime File Format*
QuickTime Playback Compatibility Chart*
QuickTimebroadcast.com - QuickTime Resource and Showcase*
QuickTime for Mac OS X - information on components (codecs)*
Applepedia Playing Video Files Wiki*
"Howto Play a Video in Your Application Using the QuickTime Framework" - A QuickTime programming tutorial
*
Quicktime 4 Linux
