Latest Version Of Apple Quicktime Player

[Kimberly Ballas]

QuickTimeis a discontinued[1] extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats.[2][3] The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application,[2] which is built-into macOS, and was formerly available for Windows.[4]

QuickTime was created in 1991, when the concept of playing digital video directly on computers was "groundbreaking."[2][3] QuickTime could embed a number of advanced media types, including panoramic images (called QuickTime VR) 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.[5][6][2][3][7] 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.[8][2] QuickTime could support additional codecs through plug-ins, for example with Perian.[9]

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.[10][11][12][1] 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 (beyond trimming clips) or plug-ins for additional codec support.[1][13] macOS Catalina dropped support for all 32-bit applications, including the QTKit framework and the old QuickTime 7.[11]

QuickTime is bundled with macOS. QuickTime for Microsoft Windows was downloadable as a standalone installation, and was bundled with Apple's iTunes prior to iTunes 10.5, but is no longer supported and therefore security vulnerabilities will no longer be patched.[14] Already, at the time of the Windows version's discontinuation, two such zero-day vulnerabilities (both of which permitted arbitrary code execution) were identified and publicly disclosed by Trend Micro; consequently, Trend Micro strongly advised users to uninstall the product from Windows systems.[15][16]

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,[17] but since version 7.2 full-screen viewing is now supported in the non-Pro version.[18]

As of early 2008, the framework hides many older codecs listed below from the user although the option to "Show legacy encoders" exists in QuickTime Preferences to use them.[20] The framework supports the following file types and codecs natively:[21]

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.

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.[23][24]

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 (e.g. Final Cut Studio, Logic Studio) 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.[25] The Pro key does not require any additional downloads; entering the registration code immediately unlocks the hidden features.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes QuickTime X. QuickTime Player X lacks cut, copy and paste and will only export to four formats, but its limited export feature is free. Users do not have an option to upgrade to a Pro version of QuickTime X, but those who have already purchased QuickTime 7 Pro and are upgrading to Snow Leopard from a previous version of Mac OS X will have QuickTime 7 stored in the Utilities or user defined folder. Otherwise, users will have to install QuickTime 7 from the "Optional Installs" directory of the Snow Leopard DVD after installing the OS.

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 Apple support 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."

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 (e.g. for subtitles). Each track either contains a digitally encoded media stream (using a specific format) 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 (without data copying).

Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively (to varying degrees) 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.

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.[37]

QuickTime 6 added limited support for MPEG-4, specifically encoding and decoding using Simple Profile (SP). Advanced Simple Profile (ASP) features, like B-frames, were unsupported (in contrast with, for example, encoders such as XviD or 3ivx). QuickTime 7 supports the H.264 encoder and decoder.[38]

Because both MOV and MP4 containers can use the same MPEG-4 codecs, they are mostly interchangeable in a QuickTime-only environment. 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[39][40] include a 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. QuickTime 7 now supports multi-channel AAC-LC and HE-AAC audio (used, for example, in the high-definition trailers on Apple's site),[41] for both .MOV and .MP4 containers.

Apple released the first version of QuickTime on December 2, 1991, as a multimedia add-on for System 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 advertisement in a window at 320240 pixels resolution.

The first commercial project produced using QuickTime 1.0 was the CD-ROM From Alice to Ocean. The first publicly visible use of QuickTime was Ben & Jerry's interactive factory tour (dubbed The Rik & Joe Show after its in-house developers). The Rik and Joe Show was demonstrated onstage at MacWorld in San Francisco when John Sculley announced QuickTime.[43]

Apple 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). It could play video at 320240 resolution at 30 frames per second on a 25 MHz Motorola 68040 CPU. It also added text tracks, which allowed for captioning, lyrics and other potential uses.

Apple contracted San Francisco Canyon Company to port QuickTime to the Windows platform.[44] 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 2.0 for Windows appeared in November 1994 under the leadership of Paul Charlton. As part of the development effort for cross-platform QuickTime, Charlton (as architect and technical lead), along with ace individual contributor Michael Kellner and a small highly effective team including Keith Gurganus, ported a subset of the Macintosh Toolbox to Intel and other platforms (notably, MIPS and SGI Unix variants) as the enabling infrastructure for the QuickTime Media Layer (QTML) which was first demonstrated at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in May 1996. The QTML later became the foundation for the Carbon API which allowed legacy Macintosh applications to run on the Darwin kernel in Mac OS X.[citation needed]

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. On January 16, 1997, Apple released the QuickTime MPEG Extension (PPC only) as an add-on to QuickTime 2.5, which added software MPEG-1 playback capabilities to QuickTime.

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