Apple's QuickTime

We spend most of our time working with and discussing Wintel based systems. There is a simple reason for this. These systems, by far, out number Apple systems which own only about 5% of the market and this may be generous. This percentage is slated to decline because of or despite any of the efforts that Apple or its supporters do. This is unfortunate, because, Apple in the past has had excellent and innovative hardware and software. In the past, the gap between Apple and Wintel based systems has been wide with Apple being clearly superior. However, in recent years, the gap has closed substantially if not completely. More people work on and develop for Wintel based systems because there are more of them. This means that there are more applications and more improvements happening on Wintel rather than Apple.

QuickTime, Apple's multimedia support, has been around a relatively long time, more than 10 years. It is an open architecture. It is comparable to Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies in that it is an umbrella that names much of the required support to create and play multimedia. Application creators and tools creators for the most part use QuickTime when they are creating either content or tools for the Apple Platform. But that is not all. There is a QuickTime for Windows so that a developer can in theory develop for Wintel systems on Apple systems and then run the result using QuickTime for Windows running on Windows systems. Here the QuickTime for Windows plays the role of Microsoft's Windows Media Technologies. It creates its own special little island where applications that were created on an Apple or using Apple multimedia technologies can run.

Apple uses a lot of third-party software as QuickTime components, including Sorenson's video codec. Sorenson's compression-decompression is famous and well respected because if produces output that runs on slow connections. QuickTime comes with a player and browser plug-in that plays many but not all types of multimedia files. Unfortunately, there are a lot of different type of multimedia files to be played QuickTime movies can be made interactive: You can point to a person in the video and cause something to happen sort of like putting a hot spot or hyperlink inside a movie and not just to stop, pause, or start it.. QuickTime plays virtual reality objects. It can stream audio and video using hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) or real-time streaming protocol (RTSP). QuickTime's file format was chosen as the basis for MPEG-4 Just as Apple lead the way with many multimedia functions, it again lead the way by including a simple movie editor as part of its operating system. Microsoft followed in Windows ME and XP with an included movie editor targeted for consumers.

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