QuickTime Turns 34 (macworld.com) 20
On Dec. 2, QuickTime turned 34, and despite its origins in Apple's chaotic 1990s (1991 to be exact), "it's still the backbone of video on our devices," writes Macworld's Jason Snell. That includes MP4 and Apple's immersive video formats for Vision Pro. From the report: By the late '80s and early '90s, digital audio had been thoroughly integrated into Macs. (PCs needed add-on cards to do much more than issue beeps.) The next frontier was video, and even better, synchronized video and audio. There were a whole lot of challenges: the Macs of the day were not really powerful to decode and display more than a few frames per second, which was more of a slideshow than a proper video. Also, the software written to decode and encode such video (called codecs) was complex and expensive, and there were lots of different formats, making file exchange unreliable.
Apple's solution wasn't to invent entirely new software to cover every contingency, but to build a framework for multimedia creation and playback that could use different codecs as needed. At its heart was a file that was a container for other streams of audio and video in various formats: the QuickTime Movie, or MOV.
[...] QuickTime's legacy lives on. At a recent event I attended at Apple Park, Apple's experts in immersive video for the Vision Pro pointed out that the standard format for immersive videos is, at its heart, a QuickTime container. And perhaps the most ubiquitous video container format on the internet, the MP4 file? That standard file format is actually a container format that can encompass different kinds of audio, video, and other information, all in one place. If that sounds familiar, that's because MPEG-4 is based on the QuickTime format.
Thirty-four years later, QuickTime may seem like a quaint product of a long-lost era of Apple. But the truth is, it's become an integral part of the computing world, so pervasive that it's almost invisible. I'd like to forget most of what happened at Apple in the early 1990s, but QuickTime definitely deserves our appreciation.
Apple's solution wasn't to invent entirely new software to cover every contingency, but to build a framework for multimedia creation and playback that could use different codecs as needed. At its heart was a file that was a container for other streams of audio and video in various formats: the QuickTime Movie, or MOV.
[...] QuickTime's legacy lives on. At a recent event I attended at Apple Park, Apple's experts in immersive video for the Vision Pro pointed out that the standard format for immersive videos is, at its heart, a QuickTime container. And perhaps the most ubiquitous video container format on the internet, the MP4 file? That standard file format is actually a container format that can encompass different kinds of audio, video, and other information, all in one place. If that sounds familiar, that's because MPEG-4 is based on the QuickTime format.
Thirty-four years later, QuickTime may seem like a quaint product of a long-lost era of Apple. But the truth is, it's become an integral part of the computing world, so pervasive that it's almost invisible. I'd like to forget most of what happened at Apple in the early 1990s, but QuickTime definitely deserves our appreciation.
appreciate? (Score:1)
QuickTime was very proprietary (Score:5, Interesting)
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Those manufacturers can go suck goat cock. I remember that for a while Flash was really bad, too. And of course you have DRM on most of the streaming services. And stupid captive portals everywhere that break the Internet.
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I remember that Apple never ported their QuickTime codecs to Linux so had to be reverse engineered and that a big argument against desktop Linux was that video playback was poor, along with other stuff like DRM, DeCSS and patents that hindered Linux video playback as well.
Wonder when VLC started to really gain popularity.
It's been a minute since I've found a need for any other player. Damn thing eats formats like a dirty Glock does ammo.
Re:QuickTime was very proprietary (Score:5, Insightful)
That was because the original QuickTime codecs were proprietary. It was the Sorensen video codec developed by Sorensen and licensed exclusively to Apple.
You have to remember QuickTime refers to many things - the MOV container format, the video playback architecture of MacOS, the video codec itself, and more.
The MP4 container file format is a subset of the original MOV QuickTime format - Apple submitted it as part of the MPEG4 standard. If you've used cellphones for a long time, you might remember 3gp as well - which is an even smaller subset of QuickTime. Any player capable of opening MOV files can open MP4 and 3GP files as they are upwardly compatible.
Sorensen was retired as QuickTime started to adopt more "standard" video and audio codecs turning it into a proper media framework.
Microsoft wanted to kill it because they were introducing Video4Windows (V4W), a framework to compete for Windows. But since QuickTime was popular and available sooner, Apple ported it to Windows. One should note that Apple's Windows ports are really ports of Mac to Windows, so early QuickTime For Windows were really containing ports of MacOS libraries. The continued on with iTunes containing a good chunk of OS X libraries and runtimes when running on Windows.
These days, Video4Windows is pretty much dead - it was replaced by DirectShow which is the media playback architecture in use today on Windows. The QuickTime media framwork is now just macOS only while the format is something the industry pretty much has standardized on for everything. I don't think Sorensen video even plays on anything now, FFMPEG being the only thing having support nowadays.
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Lots of windows apps were possible because of quicktime for windows. Adobe was built on top of it for a long time.
Long ago when Quicktime was dying because Apple abandoned it in the 2000s; the developer list had an email asking opinions about open sourcing quicktime. Apple should have open sourced most of it. MKV didn't need to happen. I certainly liked the ability to have reference movies that just worked and took no space.
The API wasn't easy. It was also a massive codebase. I don't think anything has m
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MKV did need to happen. MKV is a free and open container format, made in a way that ensures it tramples on no one's rights (e.g., the lack of FourCC codes for identifiers).
MOV is still wildly popula
"Yes, we're talking about knifing the baby." (Score:3)
And it's been abandoned for over a decade (Score:2)
Quicktime used to be the standard framework for media playback, transcoding, etc. It had a complex API, but it held up pretty well for at least fifteen years. But Apple just lost interest in it, stopped updating it, and it sort of fell into obscurity. There's no real modern replacement that covers all the same cases.
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Don't Matroska mkv files do a pretty good job?
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I'm not talking about media container formats. The MP4 container format is based directly on the MOV format and covers the most common cases, and as you mentioned, the EBML-based MKV container format deals with a few corner cases.
The Quicktime framework let you do media decoding, encoding, transcoding and playback, as well as stuff like bitmap scaling, sample rate conversion, and all sorts of other stuff. And you could use "Quicktime components" to add support for additional codecs or other functionality
Re:And it's been abandoned for over a decade (Score:4, Interesting)
Quicktime used to be the standard framework for media playback, transcoding, etc. It had a complex API, but it held up pretty well for at least fifteen years. But Apple just lost interest in it, stopped updating it, and it sort of fell into obscurity. There's no real modern replacement that covers all the same cases.
I'd say the situation is more that the tools and frameworks are available, it's just that they are now platform-specific. One of the reasons the QuickTime file format was adopted for the MP4 container format is that QT was engineered to be cross-platform and endlessly flexible – it didn't include any platform-specific garbage like a lot of the formats coming out of Microsoft at the time. This continued for a long time as QT offered plugins and players for multiple platforms, but eventually Apple realized that maintaining a cross-platform framework as complex as QuickTime wasn't a winning strategy for the long term and didn't really serve their platform (see also OpenGL).
Since then, QuickTime has slowly been sidelined in OS X and replaced with a newer framework that is OS X-only. The new framework is more performant on modern hardware, naturally, but outside of supporting modern codecs, I'm not sure it actually improves or expands upon QuickTime's overall capabilities, and of course it omits support for the more esoteric interactive media types. QuickTime was very mature and largely solved the problem space it occupied.
It is a shame that there isn't today a single pipeline for interactive media where you can just define a view in your app or webpage that can present almost any kind of media, from audio to video to 3D models to interactive flythroughs. However, one could argue that we're better off having multiple options that breed innovation, and specificity is often better than generality.
Its a Turd (Score:3, Informative)
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Yeah, LOL, the first time I encountered Quicktime I thought, "how cute, GIFs with sound." Computers struggled back then to even handle 160x160 mov clips. It got better as time went on but being an Apple thing meant the PC world moved on from it pretty quickly.
Thank YouTube for ending QT movie trailers (Score:2)
Those of us on the internet in the late 90's and early 2000's should all say an extra special prayer to YouTube for breaking up the tyranny of having to watch movie trailers using Quicktime. Huge files, long downloads and a clunky video player that constantly required updates. Thank you YouTube for putting an end to that nightmare.
This is why I still use RealPlayer (Score:3)
It has been irrelevant to most of the world (Score:2)
for many years now and I can only say one thing - good riddance.
Condolences to those who are still stuck with it, but you really don't have to.
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Hey, that Pepsi formula was super duper secret. Even more so than that goofy colonel's 11 herbs and spices.
Ah yes (Score:1)