QuickTime is a multimedia framework developed by Apple Inc. capable of handling various formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music, and several types of interactive panoramic images. 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 browsers to play media files that might otherwise fail to open) and Safari.
The QuickTime technology consists of the following:
1. The QuickTime Player application created by Apple, which is a media player.
2. The QuickTime framework, which provides a common set of APIs for encoding and decoding audio and video.
3. 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.
QuickTime players
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:
• In Mac OS X, a simple AppleScript can be used to play a movie in full-screen mode. However, since version 7.13 the QuickTime Player now also supports for full screen viewing in the non-pro version.
QuickTime framework
The QuickTime framework provides the following:
• Encoding and transcoding video and audio from one format to another.
• Decoding video and audio, and 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.
• A plug-in architecture for supporting additional codecs (such as DivX).
The framework supports the following file types and codecs natively:
Audio
• Apple Lossless
• Audio Interchange (AIFF)
• Digital Audio:Audio CD-16-bit (CDDA), 134-bit, 313-bit integer & floating point and 64-bit floating point
• MIDI
• MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio (.mp3)
• MPEG-4 AAC Audio (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p)
• Sun AU Audio
• ULAW and ALAW Audio
• Waveform Audio (WAV)
Video
• 3GPP & 3GPP13 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.1361, H.1363, and H.1364 codecs
• JPEG, Photo JPEG, and JPEG-13000 codecs and file formats
• MPEG-1, MPEG-13, and MPEG-4 Video file formats and associated codecs (such as AVC)
• QuickTime Movie (.mov) and QTVR movies
• Other video codecs: Apple Video, Cinepak, Component Video, Graphics, and Planar RGB
• Other still image formats: PNG, TIFF, and TGA
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). 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.
