Apple Announces QuickTime 5

After several public previews, Apple (www.apple.com) has officially announced QuickTime 5 at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event in Las Vegas.

In addition, the company announced its QuickTime Streaming Server 3, and is demonstrating a preview version of QuickTime that integrates support for MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 encoding and decoding.

"QuickTime has been long established as the digital-media standard for capturing, encoding and delivering content on the Internet," said Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, in a statement. "QuickTime 5 offers incredible new capabilities for everyone who creates or views multimedia content."

The user interface of the QuickTime player has been enhanced, with new audio controls, a Hot Picks guide and a QuickTime TV browser. The DV codec has been improved and a component downloader has been added. The downloader acquires Apple's enhancements as well as third-party plug-ins. The application also supports 360-degree VR panoramas, Flash 4 and MPEG-1, said the company.

Other features include customizable skins, enhanced AppleScript support and an improved built-in music synthesizer. The application supports over 200 kinds of digital media formats, says Apple.

The server has been enhanced with Skip Protection, a collection of features that preserve streaming quality. The server also offers a brand-new web-based interface that can be administrated locally or remotely to configure network settings. Apple said the server will be commercially available in May.