Quicktime 7 / Quicktime X

QuickTime 7.x QuickTime 7 represents one of the largest architectural changes to the QuickTime lineage since its first version Initially released on April 29,2005 in conjunction with Mac OS X v10.4 (for version 10.3.9 and 10.4.x), QuickTime 7.0 featured the following:
• Improved MPEG-4 compliance
• H.264/MPEG-4 AVCcod ec
• Core Graphics (Quartz) for screen drawing, allowing for live resizing and playback on an OpenGL surface
• Core Audior eplacin g Sound Manager, supporting high resolution sound
• Support for using Core Image filters in Mac OS X v10.4 on live video, also known as Core Video
• Support for Quartz Composer (.qtz) animations
• Support for distinct decode order and display order
• The QTKit, aCocoa framework for QuickTime After a couple of preview Windows releases, Apple released 7.0.2 as the first stable release on September 7, 2005
for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Version 7.0.4, released on January 10, 2006 was the first universal binary version. But it suffered numerous bugs, including a buffer overrun, which is more problematic to most users. Apple dropped support for Windows 2000 with the release of QuickTime 7.2 on July 11,2007. The last
version available for Windows 2000, 7.1.6, contains numerous security vulnerabilities. Apple has not
indicated that they will be providing any further security updates for older versions. QuickTime 7.2 is the first version for Windows Vista.

Apple dropped support for Flash content in QuickTime 7.3,
breaking content that relied on Flash for interactivity, or animation tracks and those feature were removed from Flash CS4 on Adobe's side.
Security concerns seem to be part of the decision. In QuickTime 7.3, a processor that supports SSE is required. QuickTime 7.4 does not require SSE. Unlike versions 7.2 and 7.3, QuickTime 7.4 refuses to be installed on Windows XP SP1 system (its setup program checks if Service Pack 2 is installed). QuickTime 7.5 was released on June 10,2008.


QuickTime X QuickTime X (pronounced Quicktime Ten) is the next version of QuickTime. It was announced at WWDCon June 9, 2008. It will ship with Mac OS X v10.6 in mid-2009. It will be built upon media technology first used in iPhone OS and will have support for modern codecs and more efficient media playback.
Creating software that uses QuickTime QuickTime consists of two major subsystems: the Movie Toolbox and the Image Compression Manager. The Movie Toolbox consists of a general API for handling time-based data, while the Image Compression Manager provides services for dealing with compressedr aster data as produced by video and photo codecs.
Developers can use the QuickTime software development kit (SDK ) to develop multimedia applications for Mac or Windows with the C programming language or with the Java programming language (see QuickTime for Java ), or, under Windows, using COM/ActiveX from a language supporting this. The COM/ActiveX option was introduced as part of QuickTime 7 for Windows and is intended for
programmers who want to build standalone Windows applications using high-level QuickTime movie playback and control with some import, export, and editing capabilities. This is considerably easier than mastering the original QuickTime C++ API.

QuickTime 7 for Windows introduces a completely redesigned COM/ActiveX control that is fully scriptable from Visual Basic, C#, JavaScript, C++ and other applications that can host COM objects. This means that its even easier for Windows programmers to build standalone Windows applications that use QuickTime without needing to master QuickTime’s C/C++ API. Fully scriptable using either JavaScript or VBScript, automating your QuickTime workflow just got a whole lot easier.

For example, if your Windows server can run a Visual Basic, C# or a JavaScript application that uses QuickTime, you have the ability to create custom QuickTime content dynamically for delivery via the Web. As long as your clients have QuickTime installed, your content will work with Windows and Mac clients, Internet Explorer and non-Internet Explorer browsers.

In order to access these capabilities all you need to do is download the QuickTime 7 for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK). The old link for quicktime now point to
http://developer.apple.com/technologies/mac/graphics-and-animation.html


QuickTime 7 for Mac introduced the QuickTime Kit (aka QTKit), a developer framework that is intended to replace previous APIs for Cocoa developers. This framework is for Mac only, and exists as Objective- C abstractions around a subset of the C interface. Mac OS X v10.5 extends QTKit to full 64-bit support.

QTKit is an Objective-C interface to QuickTime available on Tiger, and also available with QT7 on Panther. It supercedes the Cocoa classes NSMovieView and NSMovie with a larger set of classes which provide a comprehensive interface into QuickTime from Objective-C. In addition to basic playback and tweaking, QTKit allows full-blown editing and other such goodies.
http://developer.apple.com/legacy/mac/library/documentation/QuickTime/Conceptual/QTKitProgrammingGuide/Chapter01/Introduction.html

QTKit is also the name of an open-source wrapper around QuickTime that was made outside of Apple. For information on that wrapper, http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtkit/.