QuickTime

QuickTime is a multimedia framework originally developed by Apple Computer for its Macintosh line of computers.

Product history
QuickTime 1.0, codenamed "Warhol", was originally released for Macintosh System 6 in December 1991. Adobe Premiere 1.0 had also been in development by Randy Ubillos and was one of the first QuickTime-based video editors on the market.

Apple released QuickTime 2.0 for System 7 in June 1994, the only commercial version that was not freely released. Version 2.5 was released on July 22nd of that year.

QuickTime MPEG Extension
On January 24, 1997, Apple released the QuickTime MPEG Extension, which allowed playback of MPEG-1 video on Power Macintosh computers without the need for additional dedicated hardware.

QuickTime Musical Instruments
Adds MIDI support to QuickTime 2.0 and later. A companion QuickTime Music control panel and Macintosh MIDI Manager had also been in development for QuickTime 2.1, but were never released.

QuickTime PowerPlug
The PowerPlug extension accelerates performance of QuickTime 2.5 and later on systems with a PowerPC processor.

QuickTime VR
QuickTime VR allowed for 360-degree navigation in multimedia titles.

Deprecation
QuickTime 7 introduced QTKit in April 2005 as a new 64-bit framework in the transition leading up to QuickTime X. Classic QuickTime (pre-X) and QTKit have since been deprecated in favor of AVFoundation and AVKit, which originated on Apple's iOS platform and have now become the default media framework for macOS.

Apple discontinued QuickTime development for Windows since version 7.7.9, leading the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team to recommend the removal of obsolete versions of QuickTime from Windows computers due to the lack of future security updates. Adobe discontinued support for the classic 32-bit versions of QuickTime and its legacy formats since April 2018 and ported the ProRes codecs of QuickTime X to support its Windows apps.

Articles

 * QuickTime and the Rise of Multimedia by Hansen Hsu at the Computer History Museum (2018-03-30)