QuickTime (or QuickTime Player, referred to officially as QuickTime X in Mac OS X Snow Leopard) is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats. The term QuickTime also refers to the QuickTime Player front-end media player application, which is built into macOS, and was formerly available for Windows.
QuickTime was created in 1991, when the concept of playing digital video directly on computers was "groundbreaking." 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 MPEG-4 Part 12 as adopted in the ISO base media file format (ISOBMFF). Designed to facilitate the exchange of 'time-based media', it specifies technology independent recipes to e.g. bundle various assets into a single file, play (online) livestreams at an appropriate bitrate, or even fix Bluetooth lag" 'via temporal positioning of a source audio signal after AAC encoding'.
The contained assets refer to arbitrary external codecs, e.g. MPEG-4 Part 2, Motion JPEG 2000, pulse-density modulated DSD audio, CC, DRM, sign language, rendering object-based audio in binaural with head tracking, or even Apple Immersive Video.
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. QuickTime could support additional codecs through plug-ins, for example with Perian.
Apple discontinued the Windows version of QuickTime in 2016. 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. macOS Catalina dropped support for all 32-bit applications, including the QTKit framework and the old QuickTime 7.
Overview QuickTime is bundled with macOS. QuickTime for Microsoft Windows was downloadable as a standalone installation, and was bundled with Apple's iTunes before iTunes 10.5, but is no longer supported and therefore security vulnerabilities will no longer be patched. 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.
Software development kits (SDK) for QuickTime are available to the public with an Apple Developer Connection (ADC) subscription.
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, but since version 7.2 full-screen viewing is now supported in the non-Pro version.
QuickTime framework
The QuickTime framework provides the following:
Encoding and transcoding video and audio from one format to another. Command-line utilities afconvert (to convert audio formats), avconvert (to convert video formats) and qtmodernizer (to automatically convert older formats to H.264/AAC) are provided with macOS for power users. Decoding video and audio, then sending the decoded stream to the graphics or audio subsystem for playback. In macOS, QuickTime sends video playback to the Quartz Extreme (OpenGL) Compositor. A "component" plug-in architecture for supporting additional 3rd-party codecs (such as DivX).
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. The framework supports the following file types and codecs natively:
Audio Video Picture A-law Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) AMR Narrowband Apple Lossless Au file format Audio Interchange File Format (AIFF) Core Audio Format FLAC (since macOS 10.13) MACE Microsoft Adaptive DPCM (MS ADPCM) MIDI MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 (MP3) Pulse-code modulation (PCM) QCELP (Qualcomm PureVoice) QDesign Waveform Audio File Format (WAV) μ-law Animated GIF Animation (FLI, FLC) Apple ProRes Apple Video (MOV, QT) Audio Video Interleave (AVI) Cinepak Component Video DV 3GP and 3G2 Graphics H.261 H.262/MPEG-2 Part 2 H.263 H.264/MPEG-4 AVC H.265/HEVC (since macOS 10.13) Microsoft Video 1 Motion JPEG MPEG-1 MPEG-4 Part 2 Pixlet Planar RGB Qtch QuickTime Movie QuickTime VR Sorenson Video BMP FlashPix Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) JPEG JPEG 2000 Portable Network Graphics (PNG) TIFF Truevision TGA PNG
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.
As of Mac OS X Lion, the underlying media framework for QuickTime, QTKit, was deprecated in favor of a newer graphics framework, AVFoundation, and completely discontinued as of macOS Catalina.
Windows 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.
Irix A version of QuickTime for the Irix operating system running on SGI hardware with MIPS processors was developed in the mid-1990s but never released.
QuickTime Player QuickTime Player is the media-player application included with macOS. In addition to playing compatible audio and video files, current versions can record audio, record video from a connected camera or device, capture the Mac screen, display subtitles and captions, and perform basic movie editing. Supported editing operations include trimming, splitting a movie into clips, rearranging clips, rotating clips, and combining compatible clips into a single movie.
QuickTime Player is different from the older QuickTime 7 application and the QuickTime multimedia framework. QuickTime 7 was a 32-bit application with support for legacy media formats and optional Pro features, whereas the version included with current macOS releases is the newer QuickTime Player application.
QuickTime 7 Pro
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. The Pro key does not require any additional downloads; entering the registration code immediately unlocks the hidden features.
QuickTime 7 is still available for download from Apple, but as of mid-2016, Apple stopped selling registration keys for the Pro version.
Features enabled by the Pro license include, but are not limited to: Editing clips through the cut, copy and paste functions, merging separate audio and video tracks, and freely placing the video tracks on a virtual canvas with the options of cropping and rotation. Saving and exporting (encoding) to any of the codecs supported by QuickTime. QuickTime 7 includes presets for exporting video to a video-capable iPod, Apple TV, and the iPhone. Saving existing QuickTime movies from the web directly to a hard disk drive. This is often, but not always, either hidden or intentionally blocked in the standard mode. Two options exist for saving movies from a web browser: Save as source – This option will save the embedded video in its original format. (I.e. not limited to .mov files.) Save as QuickTime movie – This option will save the embedded video in a .mov file format no matter what the original container is/was.
QuickTime Player X
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."
File formats
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.
QuickTime and MPEG-4 On February 11, 1998, the ISO approved the QuickTime file format as the basis of the MPEG‑4 file format. The MPEG-4 file format specification was created on the basis of the QuickTime format specification published in 2001. The MP4 (.mp4) file format was published in 2001 as the revision of the MPEG-4 Part 1: Systems specification published in 1999 (ISO/IEC 14496-1:2001). In 2003, the first version of MP4 format was revised and replaced by MPEG-4 Part 14: MP4 file format (ISO/IEC 14496-14:2003). The MP4 file format was generalized into the ISO Base Media File Format ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004, which defines a general structure for time-based media files. It in turn is used as the basis for other multimedia file formats (for example 3GP, Motion JPEG 2000).
A list of all registered extensions for ISO Base Media File Format is published on the official registration authority website www.mp4ra.org. This registration authority for code-points in "MP4 Family" files is Apple Computer Inc. and it is named in Annex D (informative) in MPEG-4 Part 12.
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.