Games - QuickTime

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	Games - QuickTime

QuickTime is a multimedia technology developed by Apple Computer, capable of handling various formats of digital video, sound, text, animation, music, and immersive panoramic (and sphere panoramic) images.

The most recent version is 7.0.4 and is available for Mac OS and Microsoft Windows.

Overview

The QuickTime technology has three major components: # the QuickTime file format itself — openly documented and available for anyone to use royalty-free # a media player which Apple makes available for free download on its website and bundles with each of its computers # software development kits available for the Macintosh and Windows platforms. These kits allow people to develop their own software to manipulate QuickTime and other media files

History

Apple released the first version of QuickTime on December 2, 1991 as a multimedia add-on for System 6 and later. The lead developer of QuickTime, Bruce Leak, ran the first public demonstration at the May 1991 Worldwide Developers Conference, where he played Apple's famous 1984 TV commercial on a Mac, at the time an astounding technological breakthrough. Microsoft's competing technology — Video for Windows — did not appear until November 1992.

QuickTime 1.x

That first version of QuickTime laid down the basic architecture which survives essentially unchanged today, including multiple movie tracks, extensible media type support, an open-ended file format, and a full complement of editing functions. The original video codecs included:

the Apple Video codec (also known as "Road Pizza"), suited to normal live-action video
the Animation codec, which used simple run-length encoding and better suited cartoon-type images with large areas of flat color
the Graphics codec, optimized for 8-bits images, including ones which had undergone dithering

Apple released QuickTime 1.5 for Mac OS in the latter part of 1992. This added the SuperMac-developed Cinepak vector-quantization video codec (initially known as Compact Video), which managed the unheard-of feat of playing back video at 320×240 resolution at 30 frames per second on a 25 MHz 68040 CPU. It also added text tracks, which allowed for things like captioning, lyrics etc at very little addition to the size of a movie.

In an effort to increase the adoption of QuickTime, Apple contracted an outside company, San Francisco Canyon Company, to port QuickTime to the Windows platform. Version 1.0 of QuickTime for Windows provided only a subset of the full QuickTime API, including only movie-playback functions driven through the standard movie controller.

QuickTime 1.6.x came out the following year. Version 1.6.2 first incorporated the "QuickTime PowerPlug" which replaced some components with PowerPC-native code when running on PowerPC Macs.

QuickTime 2.x

Apple released QuickTime 2.0 for Mac OS in February 1994 — the only version never released for free. It added support for music tracks, which contained the equivalent of MIDI data and which could drive a sound-synthesis engine built into QuickTime itself (using sounds licensed from Roland), or any external MIDI-compatible hardware, thereby producing sounds using only small amounts of movie data.

Following Bruce Leak's departure to Web TV the leadership of the QuickTime team was taken over by Peter Hoddie.

QuickTime 2.0 for Windows appeared in November 1994.

The next versions, 2.1 and 2.5, reverted to the previous model of giving QuickTime away for free. They improved the music support and added sprite tracks which allowed the creation of complex animations with the addition of little more than the static sprite images to the size of the movie.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for QuickTime ]

Games - QuickTime

Overview

History

QuickTime 1.x

QuickTime 2.x

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