Most noticeable by its absence then was MIDI support. When Apple introduced QuickTime X in 2009 for Mac OS X 10.6, features began to disappear. MPEG-4 and AAC Audio were major enhancements in QuickTime 6.0 in 2002, which was supported on both classic Mac OS and OS X, as well as Windows.

With the advent of System 7 it started to flourish, and QuickTime 2.0 added features like MIDI to its original limited capabilities. It also brought some of the first attempts at virtual reality with QuickTime VR, which allowed the user to navigate around VR views.įirst introduced in 1991 for classic Mac OS System 6, a subset soon appeared on Windows too. Together they were used for everything from playing music and MIDI to interactive games, and were widely used for movies. For each of these, its framework provided for encoding and transcoding different formats, streaming decoded content for playback, an extensive core of coder-decoder modules (codecs) which was extensible by third parties, and various types of user interaction. QuickTime supported three main classes of media: audio, video and pictures. 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 several years, sales of QuickTime-based products for Windows far exceeded those for Macs.

When the MPEG-4 format was standardised in 1998, it was based on QuickTime. As one of the first extensible frameworks for multimedia, from 1991 onwards it was at the forefront of computer audio and video. 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.

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