QuickTime is Apple's multiplatform, industry-standard, multimedia software architecture that provides significant development advantages on Mac OS X. Developers can take advantage of QTKit—QuickTime's modern object-oriented programming interface—to easily create QuickTime-savvy Cocoa-based Mac OS X applications. QuickTime enables you to capture, process, encode, playback, export and deliver video, audio, animation, graphics, text and music. And since QuickTime also provides file format converters for more than 250 common image, video, and audio file formats, you can support and convert new file formats within your application quickly and easily.

QuickTime relies on a powerful set of abstractions that form the basis for processing multimedia data in your application, including movie, track, media, data reference, time scale, tagging, importers and exporters, video codecs for compressing and decompressing video, pixel formats that define the uncompressed pixel matrix in memory, and visual context. The visual context represents the GPU accelerated QuickTime rendering environment, and the addition of Core Video provides video buffer management.

QuickTime is not only about video. QuickTime's audio APIs support authoring, movie audio extraction, and audio context inserts, allowing your application to tap into QuickTime's audio rendering path during playback and extraction, allowing movie- and track-level mix and insert. During presentation you can control rate, pitch, and volume, and there is also support for metering. QuickTime also now supports standard CEA-608 closed captions, which can be played back in QuickTime Player.

The flexible architecture of the exporter components allows for various combinations of file formats and audio/video formats, so you can choose the right format for your customer, including QuickTime movie, MPEG-4, 3GPP, and DV. Opt-in export features include high-resolution audio export that supports multichannel audio with sample rates greater than 64kHz, and source movie aperture mode. You can take advantage of device-specific export functionality that is optimized for the device's capabilities, such as H.264 video and AAC audio on iPhone, iPod, and AppleTV. These settings are adjusted for the source; for example, preserving the aspect ratio (pixel size and shape) and setting the data rate according to the effective image size. You can also preserve metadata, such as QuickTime annotations. QuickTime is colorspace aware, and delivers consistent color across displays and automatic color conversion during export.

QTKit is a framework for working with QuickTime content. It is the only way to get access to QuickTime's capture capabilities, and the only way to incorporate QuickTime into 64-bit applications. QTKit Classes map to the QuickTime abstractions of movie, track, media, and so on.

QTKit allows your app to capture real-time video and audio from devices such as iSight, camcorders and tape decks, microphones and audio interfaces. QTKit includes the ability to share the iSight and other webcams between multiple applications, with accurate A/V synchronization. Supported capture devices include VDC over USB (includes the built-in iSight), IIDC over FireWire (includes the external iSight), Core Audio HAL devices, HDV and DV devices, and Sequence Grabber video devices.

Through the QuickTime plug-in, QuickTime's digital video streaming capability is extended to all popular web browsers, including Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. The plug-in supports more than thirty different media types and makes it possible to view a great variety of Internet media. QuickTime also features other advanced web streaming capabilities, such as movie "hot spots" and automatic web page launching.

Apple's cutting-edge digital media software provides a fully standards-based environment for capturing, creating, editing, playing, and delivering video, audio, and images on both Mac OS X and Windows as well as standards-compliant devices such as iPhone. With QuickTime, your programs can deliver the best possible multimedia user experience by providing professional-quality recording and playback.

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Updated: 2007-10-26