In its day QuickTime was bigger than Apple itself, so widely known that many who used it on their PCs weren’t even aware that it was an Apple product. As one of the first extensible frameworks for multimedia, from 1991 onwards it was at the forefront of computer audio and video. When the MPEG-4 format was standardised in 1998, it was based on QuickTime. For several years, sales of QuickTime-based products for Windows far exceeded those for Macs. Then, with the release of Catalina in October 2019, QuickTime was dead, leaving few Mac users now able to name its successor, AV Foundation (or AVFoundation, if you prefer), which had been introduced back in 2011.
For all intents and purposes, it died. Good riddance.
One thing I hated about “Quicktime” is that Apple couldn’t even articulate what it was. Was it a player or a format? They just kept it ambiguous on purpose like Sun did with “Java”.
Also, QuickTime (the player) for Windows was crap and it dropped a useless icon in the tray.
Eventually, a thing called “QuickTime alternative” came along, which allowed everyone to get rid of QuickTIme player.
Quicktime in this context isn’t a format or a program. It’s a framework. Frameworks are massive libraries that implement a project environment almost as unabridged as an OS can be (spoiler: “Carbon” was basically Quicktime’s system portability layer, originally for OS9 and ported to OSX, technically Windows too). Frameworks are in turn “applied” in Applications. Quicktime Player itself was always deceptively small because it was literally just a UI exposing internal interfaces to Quicktime in a much simpler capacity than, say, Final Cut.
It’s more than a framework (set of libraries). It’s also a video format (it uses the filename extensions MOV and QT). And although the container is the same specification which defines the MP4 container, MOV and QT files are allowed to contain additional proprietary video streams (the most common being Road Pizza aka RPZA and Sorenson Media Video 1 and 3 aka SVQ1 and SVQ3). Files with a MOV extension can also take AVC/H.264 video streams like MP4 files can and can also take M-JPEG (Nikon cameras used this). But anyway MOV/QT is a format in its own right, and it’s also called “QuickTime”. So, we are now in the situation where QuickTime (the framework) is dead but QuickTime (the format) lives on because those old videos have to be playable, so you hear confusing statements such as “QuickTime is dead but you can still play QuickTime media”.
To give credit where credit is due, Microsoft did the right thing and made sure there is no confusion between DirectShow and the WMV and WMA formats by simply giving them separate names instead of going down the “let’s confuse everyone” route like Apple did when they named everything “QuickTime”.
QuickTime is basically the umbrella term Apple uses for their video (encoding, decoding, streaming) technologies, just like how QuickDraw was the same for 2D/3D graphics tech.
QuickTime has involved many things through it’s history; several different codecs, players, plugins, etc. It’s still a thing today with its incarnation as ProRes.
There has always been a big deal of confusion w video tech, in terms of coded/wrapper/player… I think that entire field likes to be confusing on purpose.
IDK which I hated worse back in the day, QT player or Real Player, both were absolute trash in Windows and the playback was often a choppy mess. The second VLC could convert those formats I consigned both to the depths of hell where they belonged.
bassbeast,
It’s no longer supported, but I really liked media player classic back in the day. It was a no-frills player that did exactly what I needed.
https://mpc-hc.org/
Today I use VLC but also find MPV’s simplicity appealing.
https://mpv.io/
Uhh just FYI but MPC is still very much active, it was forked when the original was abandoned and is currently either available as part of K-Lite Codec pack (which I use as Windows codecs suuuck) or you can get it stand alone, last release was like a week ago. Link below..
https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1831201#post1831201
bassbeast,
Thanks for the link. It’s nice to see that it was forked by a new maintainer, long live open source
The MPC website doesn’t mention that there’s a new fork. It says “MPC-HC is not under development since 2017. Please switch to something else.”
The new maintainer suggests he doesn’t want any feature requests but he’s still putting out bug fixes.
If I were a windows user today, I’d probably still give it a shot!
Why “good riddance”? Isn’t this the market losing another choice and one that’s been at the forfront of innovation for decades. Without QuickTime and its streaming codecs there would be no Netflix or open video codecs in html5. QuickTime should be celebrated as the game changer it was.
Adurbe,
I think competition is good too, but how do you defend the statement that there would be no netflix or open video codecs in html5? Of course there would be. R&D for video codecs is much larger than any single company. Just because apple was using its control to monopolize video codecs on the iphone doesn’t mean the rest of the industry was particularly dependent on apple and if anything apple actually held back “open video codecs” on the iphone forcing the world to use encumbered ones.
Because the codecs used in both are based on what was developed as part of QuickTime. And was offered licence free as part of the Mpeg4/Mp4 standards.
These revolutionised the ability to stream media over the Internet thanks to the compression technologies that are still in use in Netflix today. The HTML5 video support is based on the same format that was fundamentaly based on QuickTime.
Adurbe,
It makes sense for there to be a standard, but those services would clearly still exist if apple weren’t part of the standard. It’s like saying we wouldn’t have file compression without PKWARE. Of course ZIP files serve as a useful standard but nobody should be suggesting that there wouldn’t be file compression without PKWARE.
Apple is both a licensor and licensee of mpeg-la. I don’t know what apple’s cut is as a licensor but apparently they almost didn’t accept the mpeg4 standard in quicktime over a licensing dispute:
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-shuns-mpeg-4-licensing-terms/
Patent pools and the associated disputes are exactly why google wanted to promote a truly open royalty free alternative standard.
What “choice” is there exactly? For a long time now, MOV/QT stopped evolving its proprietary formats and they went with AVC/H.264. The only “advantage” of MOV nowadays is that it can include non-compatible audio (using the Apple audio formats) in order to make conversion to standard MP4 harder.
Look, I understand why so many companies developed proprietary video stream formats in the 1990s and 2000s. You see, Mpeg1, Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 Part 2 all required a “content fee” but didn’t offer much of a bitrate advantage over M-JPEG to justify that cost. So, many companies big and small (Microsoft, Apple, Sorenson, Real Media, Duck/On2) started developing proprietary codecs to provide an option for royalty-free internet video that was better than M-JPEG. And those formats had to be kept proprietary and closed so that the MPEG LA patent holders couldn’t analyse the specification and assert patents on it (Microsoft made the mistake of opening WMV9 as VC-1 under the belief it didn’t violate any patents, and ooops! the patent holders started pointing at parts of the specification and asserting patents on them, so a MPEG LA patent pool was formed).
Then H.264 (and more specifically the x264 encoder) came and steamrolled everything because the bitrate advantages were actually worth the “content fee” (plus it could be hardware-accelerated, being an ISO standard and all).
Then On2 kind-of caught up with VP8, which Google bought (and opened) and paid the patent holders to bugger off. Then VP9 and AV1 were created as additional options (though without paying the patent holders to bugger off this time). By that time Apple and Microsoft had worked themselves in the patent pools deeply enough that they decided to support HEVC instead.
That’s the whole story of internet video right there.
tl;dr: MOV doesn’t provide any meaningful choice anymore, it’s just a pesky deviation from MP4 nowadays.
Also, forgot to say that, the fact all those proprietary formats weren’t a standard kept them out of the lucrative consumer electronics industry. The moment any of those proprietary formats dared become a standard (such as WMV9), it was patent litigation time.
Mpeg4 Is Quicktime. And the h264 was simply an extention of that. Which was in no small way contributed to by the quicktime team.
Choice and competition is what the market is all about to drive innovation. Without Real/MS/Apple pushing the formats forward, we stagnate. This is basically the same as what happened in other markets like Web Browsers.
“MPEG4 systems” aka the MP4 container is indeed QuickTime. But Apple has no patents in MPEG4 Part 2 (the video stream format).
Also, Apple stopped developing their own codecs since they got themselves in the AVC/H.264 and HEVC/H.265 patent pools. QuickTime
(the file format) nowadays has gone with AVC/H.264 and exists for the sole purpose of creating audio incompatibilities with MP4 files.
If I may add, singe-vendor codecs aren’t competitive nowadays. Even VP8 failed to catch H.264 despite being a newer format It’s either ISO/ITU codecs or cooperative codecs like AV1.
Let me reflect that back then… Since the death of competition in the sector (QuickTime, Real, etc), where is innovation coming from? H.264 is nearly 20 years old and still the “best” available? Nothing can be optimised further or done in a different way with 20 years of chip innovation? Quicktime was past its heyday, no doubt, but it’s death is a symbol of an entire area of computing that has stagnated. And celebrating that feels alien to me.
Adurbe,
Like Daala, VP8, VP9, HVEC, etc? H.265 HVEC is already considered the successor to the H.264 standard.
In terms of adaption unfortunately there are large financial disincentives for adopting new technology before the patents have expired. You agree to pay the royalties or risk triple damages if you infringe knowingly. H.265 will probably become more popular with content providers and manufacturers once the patents expire.
Innovation is coming from:
– Combined ISO and ITU efforts following the combined ISO and ITU effort known as H.264. Namely H.265 (HEVC) and H.266 (VVC)
– Collaborative codecs such as AV1 that are giving the above a run for their money (aka patent royalties)
See above.
Let’s see:
– YouTube has already switched to VP9 for web browsers and for clients that support it (and only serves H.264 for backwards compatibility reasons), and YouTube 4K is served exclusively in VP9. AV1 is exclusively used for HDR and 8K content.
– Blu-Ray uses HEVC for 4K HDR Blu-Rays
– HEVC broadcasts (4K HLG) are already happening in Europe, and HEVC has been standardised as a mandatory codec for ATSC 3.0.
H.264 is the format used for Blu-Ray HD content and for HD TV transmissions for compatibility reasons. Same way that DVD-Video content is still Mpeg2 and some EU countries still use Mpeg2 for SD broadcasts. BTW there are no new rollouts of H.264 on new platforms.
QuickTime (the player, not the codec) was one of the most awful pieces of software that I ever had the displeasure to use since Windows 3.11.
And did the feat to remain awful for the entirety of their lifetime.
The article does not make a single mention of the Sorenson codec.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorenson_Media#Encoding_technologies
That was the only reason I downloaded QuickTime on my (then) Windows 98. And as soon as MPEG4 arrived, or rather DivX :), it was no longer necessary.
Back in the day, before YouTube, before even Real Player, the only way to play movie trailers on the PC was using QuickTime and SVQ1 codec. I remember something like 320×240 level performance on early Pentiums, and some other higher resolutions on newer machines.
Again, it was a completely closed codec, with no viable alternative at the time. I am really glad more open codecs (MPEG4, DivX) took over. And we are no longer are bound to proprietary software for playing simple movie clips.
sukru,
The intel indeo codec was viable and popular on windows throughout the 90s, but it was also proprietary.
https://soggi.org/misc/articles/Intel-Indeo-video-audio-codec.htm
The mpeg consortium brought much needed standardization, but its implementations including divx were proprietary. Xvid was the open source implementation of it and brought in some new advancements. However the hardware players only supported the commercial divx version.
http://www.differencebetween.net/technology/difference-between-divx-and-xvid/
The mpeg standards were fairly well supported in computers, dvd players and beyond. For better or worse though the MPEG-LA was very strict about licensing, which made it problematic to use legally in open software.
According to the mpegla website, it seems that the 264 patents have expired at least in the US.
http://www.mpegla.com/programs/avc-h-264/patent-list/
But they don’t provide a similar list for h265, which may be intentional so people cannot identify them to try and work around them.
http://www.mpegla.com/programs/hevc/
Alfman,
Yes, MPEG-LA is very stingy with their patents, sometimes even pushing “too much”: https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-reaches-deal-with-mpeg-la-over-its-vp8-video-codec/
However they at least had technical documentation and reference code, which helped alternative implementations. And, initially those open source codecs were developed outside their patent reach. So, it was a kinda okay-ish grey area.
Anyway, yes, HEVC is once again bringing the very bad days back:
https://www.pcgamer.com/samsung-sued-over-hevc-video-codec-patents/
sukru,
Yea no kidding. I don’t believe mathematics and algorithms should ever have been allowed as patents. As the number of software developers working on a problem increases, the chance of two independently coming up with the same algorithms approaches 100%. MPEG-LA like other patent trolls create legal minefields that create huge inefficiencies and hold back innovation.
Alfman,
I believe multimedia codecs are one of the few actual valid cases for software patents. Unlike inventing “one click”, they really have researchers spend considerable time on them.
That being said, a bit of reform would not hurt.
At least decoding should be available for free for non-commercial use, or royalty free for commercial ones.
Locking out user’s own data is never acceptable. If I buy a Sony camera, I should not be forever (15 years) bound by Sony’s patents for my own videos.
sukru,
Yes, but the same is true if I invent my own codec and get sued because overlaps in the math that underpins everyone’s work is inevitable. I’ll end up owing royalties for *my time*. The patent system creates monopolistic land grabs over mathematics and computer science. There are no natural limits to the number of developers who can independently derive and use the same algorithms. Yet because of software patents we have to pay royalties over math and algorithms that naturally have infinite supply, it’s illogical. Software should be protected by copyrights and not patents.
Take google as an example. They paid hundreds of millions for a codec and they intentionally put tons of work and money into trying to avoid the patent landmines. Yet despite their goal, they still ended up having to pay royalties on their own property on top of all the money and work they put into it. Most software engineers feel this is unreasonable. If, through our own efforts, we can solve a problem using our own code, then the state should not have a right to grant monopolies depriving us of the fruits of our labor. Software patents do much more harm than good and should be scrapped.
You’re looking at the ends and saying that X is unacceptable, but would say the means themselves are just as unacceptable.
I’m pretty sure neither the founders nor congress ever intended for software & mathematical concepts to be patentable. The corporate world managed to slip them through loose wording and the courts didn’t question it. You suggest that patent laws might carve out rules for specific domains like codecs, but IMHO that just makes a broken system more complex. Software engineers just want to do their jobs and not have to worry about code they’re not allowed to write because someone else who may have had nothing to do with their work was granted a patent monopoly.
Alfman,
Without software patents, companies would resort to worse tactics to protect trade secrets. Sorenson was one such example (albeit it was hybrid). There would be even less collaboration.
That being said, in the current implementation, patents *can* be used as a stronger form of trade secret enforcement. Not only you get to prevent copies, but as you mentioned, anything similar is also prohibited.
With weaponized patents, “submarine patents”, patent trolls, non-practicing entities, we have a lot to fix in the system.
But the core concept still stays relevant. You publish your design, if someone wants, they can license it. If they want to avoid it, they can work around with a different design. (The latter part is very difficult to do, unfortunately).
Adding to this: maybe asimple test could be “can this be discovered trivially by an independent person”? As in “one click” or “FAT file system long file names”.
Anyway, I think we should push for a reform, and the sooner it will be, the better.
sukru,
Well, even assuming every single software patent were to stay as a trade secret instead, it would still be better than a 20 year monopoly on derivable math and algorithms during which companies and developers have to be at risk of being sued over their own work.
In terms of doing good, I agree with you that publishing information is supposed to be the reason patent monopolies are justified. In practice though I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the majority of software developers wouldn’t even care if all the published software patent applications went strait in the trash. That’s how useless, generic, obfuscated software patents are. Any semblance of useful information is lost once the patent lawyer gets a hold of it. Software developers have thousands of resources available to them and practically all of them are much better at disseminating knowledge than software patents do. So I don’t think this “spread the knowledge” justification can be cited as a good reason to keep software patents around in good faith.
One might argue that patent monopolies provide motivation to create new inventions. This argument has some logic to it, but the underlying assumption is that there wasn’t already a motivation in the first place. The vast majority of developers are already incentivized to create goods and services by the market itself. If developers were already motivated to do something, then providing a redundant motive becomes much harder to justify considering the negatives.
So I’m not at all convinced of the case FOR software patents. Meanwhile the case AGAINST granting software patent monopolies increases the larger the industry becomes because they fundamentally do not scale! Patents are supposed to be unique, but since there are so many software patents and so much prior art that determining whether any particular new patent application actually is unique has become impossible for the patent system to determine. The official solution is that patents can be granted regardless of non-determination and the validity of a patent has to be determined by courts. This is terrible news for those obtaining patents “I own a patent, now I have to spend millions litigating whether my patent is legit”. This is also terrible news for those being sued over patents “I am being sued and have to spend millions to defend myself over patents that may not be legit”. Either way developers who can’t afford legal teams are the losers. Even for companies that can afford litigation, it creates large inefficiencies and high costs of doing business that we all inevitably end up paying for in the form of higher prices and less competition.
It’s also bad for developers who, unless they stick to 20+ year old algorithms, have no feasible way to make sure their own algorithms are non-infringing regardless of their intentions. Even if a developer were willing to allocate an absurd 50% of their time trying to identify infringement and work around existing patents, it wouldn’t be enough to keep up with the 100 software patents a day to say nothing of the 20 year backlog. And you have to multiply this inefficiency across the whole industry, The overhead is untenable. Really the only saving grace for software patents is that they are so poorly enforced that most developers just ignore them. But just as it makes little sense to justify bad laws on the basis that they are poorly enforced, so too does it make little sense to justify bad patent policies on the basis that they are poorly enforced.
What you mention is yet another anti-feature. When you grant monopolies over the best algorithms and punish developers who infringe them in court, it leads to developers collectively wasting time just to implement worse algorithms. Even if this waste of time appeases the patent courts, it’s hard to see it as anything other than a counterproductive outcome.
I understand the “ideals” behind the patent system. There was a time I just took them for granted in simplified terms as I think most people do. But when you look at the way software patents create mutually exclusive land grabs over derivable math & algorithms it becomes evident that it cannot hold up under it’s own weight. At best it provides little benefit to a few at very high cost to the rest.
I’ll grant you that some corporations do benefit from owning patent monopolies as well as the high legal costs that deter competition. But I would point out that their desire to use patents as an anti-competitive tool is not a good reason for society to grant monopolies on math & algorithms in the first place. Even those who don’t have a problem with patents on software/math/algorithms should acknowledge that it’s the lawyers who win. Most normal developers just want to write code and build stuff, not go to court over it.
Edit: Sorry about the length of the post, I have a lot to say on this!
The late 90’s and 2000’s were a true wild west when it came to video codecs. Most platforms had their own codecs, from WMV containers on Windows, to Quicktime on MacOS (and later Windows), to the cross platform, but utterly crap RealVideo, along with multitudes of other competitors and open standards. Media consumption in the 2000’s really required at least 3 different software packages to view most content.
The standardisation on MPEG-4 and later H.264 really helped in this regard, and luckily we don’t have to deal with this issue as much any more. And if you do stumble across something odd or unusual, VLC will play it.
The123king,
WMV was just another container for a slightly incompatible version of MPEG4. I think the main reason, in addition to “not invented here”, was streaming.
Back then AVI was pretty bad for streaming. MPEG containers, too had issues. So Microsoft built their own thing (ASF/WMV).
As long as everything worked with MPlayer, I was fine. Of course mplayer, too, is pretty much “retro” software at the moment.
One thing I sure don’t miss is the era where proprietary video codecs were used as competitive weapons. QuickTime, WMV, RealMedia, and more were each bids to get you to install a new piece of software that their vendors saw as their beachhead on your desktop, with the inevitable crappy updater process sitting in your taskbar. Massively duplicated effort and secrecy and marketing just to watch a video file. I am really glad that open standards seem to be overtaking everything else but companies like Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming to this point.
It’s also worth noting that QuickTime’s uneven quality as a Windows application during its heyday was not all due to Apple; anyone else remember the infamous “knife the baby” antitrust revelation? https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Microsoft-Asked-Apple-to-Knife-the-Baby-Court-2980345.php
Can’t not link the QuickTime 4 GUI Hall of Shame entry: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtimeno.htm
My eyes!!! It’s bleeding!
Haha it was bad, I remember it was a terrible use of space!
Realplayer didn’t start out too bad but it became just awful over time…
https://www.flickr.com/photos/christiaancolen/18570291256
https://www.pcworld.com/article/535838/worst_products_ever.html (see #2 in this list)
Note: It seems the author may have been trying to make it look worse by intentionally using 4bit graphics instead of true color which was standard by then, but I didn’t find another screen shot of that version.
This doesn’t explain why small companies like Sorenson, Real Media and Duck/On2 also developed proprietary formats.
(warning, content repetition from my previous comment follows).
The reason so many companies developed proprietary video formats in the 1990s and 2000s is that Mpeg1, Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 Part 2 all required a “content fee” but didn’t offer much of a bitrate advantage over M-JPEG to justify the cost. So, many companies big and small (Microsoft, Apple, Sorenson, Real Media, Duck/On2) started developing proprietary codecs to provide an option for royalty-free internet video that was better than M-JPEG. And those formats had to be kept closed and proprietary so that the MPEG LA patent holders couldn’t analyse the specification and assert patents on it (Microsoft made the mistake of opening WMV9 as VC-1 under the belief it didn’t violate any patents, and ooops! the MPEG LA patent holders started pointing at parts of the specification and asserting patents, so a MPEG LA patent pool was formed). Also, not being an actual standard kept those proprietary formats out of the lucrative consumer electronics industry. The moment any of those proprietary formats dared become a standard (such as WMV9), it was patent litigation time.
Then H.264 (and more specifically the x264 encoder) came and steamrolled everything in internet video, because the bitrate advantages it offered were actually worth the “content fee” (plus it could be hardware-accelerated, being an ISO standard and all, which back then was important for HD resolutions).
Then On2 kind-of caught up with VP8, which Google bought (and opened) and paid the patent holders to bugger off. Then VP9 and AV1 were created as additional options (though without Google paying the patent holders to bugger off this time). By that time Apple and Microsoft had worked themselves in the patent pools deeply enough that they decided to support HEVC instead.
That’s the whole story of internet video right there.
You have not experienced the phantom menace until you watch it in it’s original 100mb real media glory
FWIW, the QuickTime Player is still very much included in Monterey. Just tried it on my m1.
Fun fact – not so long time ago, you couldn’t sell apps that used the WxWidgets framework in the AppStore, because some part of it was linked to old QuicktTime.
First, I had less than zero percent anything to do with QuickTime but I would give 99% of my body to have been part of that and to BE part of that still.
People think that QuickTime is dead but it is ABSOLUTELY not! Have you heard of iMove? Have you heard of Apple Music (I HATE the program but love the music)? Have you heard of MPEG4? AAC (which is encrypted MPEG4 files). You can’t find too many audio players or video players that do not have QuickTime built into those programs EVEN IF the people that make their products don’t think so. Because QuickTime was HOW companies built successfully multi-media products.
Just for fun. Go find any box of software that played or created multi-media files back in the 1990s and see how many of them had QuickTime on the front of the box or in the credits. It’s hard to find products that didn’t.
I want to take a step back here. Apple didn’t created multi-media. I’m not saying they did. But what they did was take something like say … music players that didn’t use cassette tapes or CDs but devices you could pick up and carry with you, most of those things were utter CRAP compared to the iPod when the iPod came out and QuickTime was just as huge in that space as the iPod and the iPhone and other Apple products.
Oh, and the format on CDs is a QuickTime format. Every time you put in a CD and play (watch) anything from a CD you are playing something with the QuickTime format. MPEG4, as I mentioned already, became a standard because of QuickTime. Most of what people watch on the internet is MPEG4 or a was inspired directly by it.
No, Apple didn’t “invent” the idea of multi-media but they were definitely the ones that made it a reality in the consumer space on both Mac and … shudder … Windows but also on BeOS and OS/2 and UNIX and basically EVERY OS out there that plays multi-media owes a HUGE thank you for Apple for creating QuickTime.
You don’t agree? Fine, tell me how many more years we would have been waiting for –consumers– to be able to make their own multi-media. Then go ask the heavyweights back in the day and even today where their multi-media roots came from. They might not mention QuickTime. You are right. But look at who they DO mention and then go back and look to see where THAT company got their roots from. Not just the idea of multi-media but the practical capabilities where the rubber meets the road. A LOT more companies than you think got started on REAL products working with the QuickTime team at Apple, even those using Windows and Unix and BeOS and OS/2 and …
First, I KNOW you are going to say, but you’re an Apple fanatic and I would have to tell you that you are wrong.
Yes, I USE Apple products because BeOS doesn’t exist anymore outside of the Five boxed version of BeOS that I have on my shelf at home. Haiku (the open source version of BeOS) is not ready to replace MacOS on my computers yet or I wouldn’t be using Apple anymore.
IBM totally F****ED up, their @*&%(&@#@( imbecile #$*&#$# that screw the OS/2 team at IBM. Microsoft tries to take credit for OS/2 but guess what. Windows 95 was and still is dog poo and so far there are quite a few things I love about OS/2 and that I could do with OS/2 (and BeOS) back then that you STILL can’t reproduce in Windows. The list is over 150 items and not just one, two or three.
I used seven different OSs, not counting mainframes before BeOS came out in 1995 and was thrilled with the “idea” or the possibilities of what those OSs *might* do some day in the future but did I love them? NO. But I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED BeOS and to a smaller degree OS/2 and for totally different reasons.
MacOS is “ok”. I have a 1,000 different (no exaggeration) that I would dramatically change in MacOS if I were suddenly granted the powers to change things. But then if I got total control of Windows? I would shut it down and wipe it off the map. It isn’t worth saving.
But this is about QuickTime. You don’t like it? Why? Because it came out of Apple? Or because you didn’t like … what? You don’t like creating, editing, distributing “multi-media” on something other than a UNIX farm or a CRAY?
Everyone else was making digital VCR interfaces where Apple made the first usable and FUN way to make and edit multi-media with both QuickTime and hand-in-hand with HyperCard. Don’t know about HyperCard? Something else I had less than zero percent contribution with. It was THE internet before the internet existed. It was LITERALLY part of what the WWW was based on.
Oh, and the WWW and the game DOOM were created on NextStep computers. They had a ripoff program (that wasn’t as good as QuickTime) called, “NextTime”.
You may like QuickTime but you like being able to create and edit movies and audio and pictures (multi-media) because of QuickTime if you want to admit it or not.
Sabon,
That may have been true on the mac side, but on windows the AVI format was king. Everything supported AVI since that’s what the windows multimedia API supported.
I used Asymetrix Digital Video Producer and Pinnacle Studio for windows, which were both AVI based. MPEG1 and MPEG2 (for DVD) were popular formats, but one generally needed to convert between these formats and AVI…
avi2mpg1
TMPGEnc
VirtualDub
It was difficult to handle DVDs generically due to the interactive nature of DVDs, that required specialized VOB and IFO editors. Though some software could output a fixed template.
Support for Quicktime wasn’t that common on windows. In my archive I don’t see any tools that support the QT format aside from the players. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim there were none, but it was less common on windows. I see more support for MS ASF and WMV than I do apple quicktime.
You say “CD” but you must mean something else. There were “video cds” that used standard CD-rom/CD-r disks, but those were based on the mpeg1 standard and not quicktime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_CD
DVDs were obviously based on mpeg2.
Do you mean just burning your own files to a CD-r? If this is what you mean then sure you could distribute quicktime files via CD, but you could do that with any video file. Was there a special quicktime CD format that I’m not aware of? If so I honestly never came across it.
To the extent that MacOS is more popular than windows in our graphics and video industries, then yes quicktime probably has always been popular for them. But on windows quicktime really didn’t become popular until they defined an mpeg4 standard derived from it. The much needed standard quickly become popular, but only the features that made it into the standard are well supported by most software and hardware since they are targeting the mpeg4 standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#QuickTime_and_MPEG-4