QuickTime is an extensible multimedia architecture created by Apple, which supports playing, streaming, encoding, and transcoding a variety of digital media formats.

Over the 1990s, QuickTime became a dominant standard for digital multimedia, as it was integrated into many websites, applications, and video games, and adopted by professional filmmakers.

[23][24] A version of QuickTime for the Irix operating system running on SGI hardware with MIPS processors was developed in the mid-1990s but never released.

[25] The Pro key does not require any additional downloads; entering the registration code immediately unlocks the hidden features.

Features enabled by the Pro license include, but are not limited to: Mac OS X Snow Leopard includes QuickTime X. QuickTime Player X lacks cut, copy and paste and will only export to four formats, but its limited export feature is free.

Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively (to varying degrees) include AIFF, WAV, DV-DIF, MP3, and MPEG program stream.

With additional QuickTime Components, it can also support ASF, DivX Media Format, Flash Video, Matroska, Ogg, and many others.

[32][33] [34] [35] [36] A list of all registered extensions for ISO Base Media File Format is published on the official registration authority website www.mp4ra.org.

This registration authority for code-points in "MP4 Family" files is Apple Computer Inc. and it is named in Annex D (informative) in MPEG-4 Part 12.

Accordingly, the MPEG-4 container is designed to capture, edit, archive, and distribute media, unlike the simple file-as-stream approach of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2.

This is especially true on hardware devices, such as the Sony PSP and various DVD players, on the software side, most DirectShow / Video for Windows codec packs[39][40] include a MP4 parser, but not one for MOV.

QuickTime 7 now supports multichannel AAC-LC and HE-AAC audio (used, for example, in the high-definition trailers on Apple's site),[41] for both .MOV and .MP4 containers.

The original video codecs included: The first commercial project produced using QuickTime 1.0 was the CD-ROM From Alice to Ocean.

The first publicly visible use of QuickTime was Ben & Jerry's interactive factory tour (dubbed The Rik & Joe Show after its in-house developers).

The Rik and Joe Show was demonstrated onstage at MacWorld in San Francisco when John Sculley announced QuickTime.

Version 1.6.2 first incorporated the "QuickTime PowerPlug" which replaced some components with PowerPC-native code when running on PowerPC Macs.

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 a limited set of instrument sounds licensed from Roland), or any external MIDI-compatible hardware, thereby producing sounds using only small amounts of movie data.

As part of the development effort for cross-platform QuickTime, Charlton (as architect and technical lead), along with ace individual contributor Michael Kellner and a small highly effective team including Keith Gurganus, ported a subset of the Macintosh Toolbox to Intel and other platforms (notably, MIPS and SGI Unix variants) as the enabling infrastructure for the QuickTime Media Layer (QTML) which was first demonstrated at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in May 1996.

The QTML later became the foundation for the Carbon API which allowed legacy Macintosh applications to run on the Darwin kernel in Mac OS X.

In 1994, Apple filed suit against software developer San Francisco Canyon for intellectual property infringement and breach of contract.

[45] Apple alleged that San Francisco Canyon had helped develop Video for Windows using several hundred lines of unlicensed QuickTime source code.

Apple also licensed several third-party technologies for inclusion in QuickTime 3.0, including the Sorenson Video codec for advanced video compression, the QDesign Music codec for substantial audio compression, and the complete Roland Sound Canvas instrument set and GS Format extensions for improved playback of MIDI music files.

This supported a comprehensive user interaction model for mouse and keyboard event handling based in part on the AML language from the Apple Media Tool.

[47] It introduced features that most users now consider basic:[48] On December 17, 1999, Apple provided QuickTime 4.1, this version's first major update.

[85] But it removed support for various widely used formats, in particular the omission of MIDI caused significant inconvenience and trouble to many musicians and their potential audiences.

While Safari uses FairPlay, Google Chrome and Firefox use Widevine for DRM, whose content is not protected from QuickTime screen capturing.

[111] Since the release of macOS 10.15, AVKit and AVFoundation are used instead (due to the removal of 32-bit audio and video codecs, as well as image formats and APIs supported by QuickTime 7).

QuickTime 7.5.5 and earlier are known to have a list of significant vulnerabilities that allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (out-of-bounds memory access and application crash) on a targeted system.

The list includes six types of buffer overflow,[118][119][120][121][122][123] data conversion,[124] signed vs. unsigned integer mismatch,[125] and uninitialized memory pointer.

[126] QuickTime 7.6 has been found to disable Mac users' ability to play certain games, such as Civilization IV and The Sims 2.