| | | | A multimedia technology developed by Apple for the development, storage and playback of audio, video, animation, graphics and text from within a single file. It was first released in 1991 and the basic architecture is broadly the same today. The technology consists of three aspects - the development framework, the file format and the player. The framework supports the encoding, decoding and transcoding of a number of video and audio formats and also has a plug-in structure to allow addtional codecs to be added. Filetypes supported natively include: 3GPP / 3GPP2, AVI, BMP, DV, DVC Pro, Flash, GIF, H.261 / H.263 / H.264, JPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, AVC, MOV, Sorenson Video 2 / 3, PNG, TIFF, TGA (video) and Apple Lossless, AIFF, CDDA, MIDI, MP3, M4A, M4B, M4P, QDesign Music, QCELP, ULAW / ALAW, WAV (audio). The file is of the container format type in that it consists of a number data streams compressed using a variety of codecs, along with a mechanism to play them back in synchrony. The QuickTime Player is distributed free although to enable features other than simple playback a licence must be bought. Other multimedia player applications, many free, offer additional functionality. Although originally written for the Apple Macintosh, QuickTime player software now exists for Windows PCs also, either as a browser plugin or standalone player. QuickTime files have the .mov extension and are also referred to as MOV files. The QuickTime format forms the basis of the MPEG-4 (.mp4) container standard and was chosen because of it's ease of use when editing. | | | |
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