Whatever Happened to QuickTime?

"My main use of it these days is transcoding to 3GP with QuickTime Pro," says Nels Johnson, contributing editor at DV magazine and president of Dowload Recordings, "not to mention swapping English-language tracks into European movie torrents."

He adds, "Regarding QuickTime track swapping for MP4 or MOV movies, if I have a good (perhaps screener) version with OK video but a non-English audio track and also a cam version with an OK English audio track, I can use the Add/Delete track facility of QuickTime Pro to combine the desired tracks of each into a good video/English audio movie without recompressing."

Lowney hopes QuickTime’s days of interactivity are not over. "There’s a lot more there than meets the eye (DRM coding for example), but the most obvious advantage is the use of sprites over static screen shots as opposed to 15 to 30 fps linear video. It’s much more efficient. The longer a screen shot remains visible, the greater the advantage over linear video. I would like to see Apple renew its commitment to interactive media and perhaps they will, starting with Core Animation in Leopard. We shall see. Their current focus on MPEG-4 may foreshadow a switch to BIFS (MPEG-11, or Binary Format for Scenes) for interactivity at some point in the future."

"We’re a Mac shop so most of the video we do is QuickTime, although final deployment is almost always FLV," says Dana Kirk, a lead developer at Hitch Creative. "Occasionally, we convert to Windows Media. It’s interesting seeing the major shift towards Flash video on the web. I’m wondering what Silverlight is going to do to the market."As a tool, for whatever reason, I’ve never thought of QuickTime as anything much more than a media player," Kirk continues. "Years ago, I used to use an Avid, then Media 100, and I always felt that QuickTime was too limiting for our purposes. If we edit anything now, it’s with iMovie or Final Cut Pro and then converted/compressed with Sorenson Squeeze to whatever format we need. If we get video from anyone else, however, we usually ask for QuickTime if possible."

He adds, "We’re developing a service geared towards the mobile market (Windows Mobile initially) and are a little disappointed that so much video on the web is Flash-based and thus unavailable for our market. I had heard that Silverlight will allow you to transcode to multiple formats effortlessly, which would be a big bonus for us."

James Rieker, educational media developer for the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Critical Care Medicine, says, "We still author our web-based educational materials in QuickTime directly. Although we tend to deliver in several formats, including Flash, QuickTime is still the hub for origination." All of the doctors in his medical fellowship program, for example, have video iPods. Rieker records PowerPoint lectures on Macs, outputs to MOVs, and then converts them to video podcasts.

"The movies are also available on our educational server as larger (640 x 480), high-fidelity renditions of the slides," Rieker says. "We take some of these and put them on the web for a larger audience as Flash video. Fellows have the flexibility of transcoding the QuickTime movies into whatever format they want (you can’t do that easily with Flash) and don’t have to have a wrapper like Flash does. I like Flash, but it is one of our delivery vehicles, not our authoring tool."

As an example, he points to a page he recently put together collecting clips from a recent medical conference . "I did this page using QuickTime as a palette to lay out the talking head with the slides and video, and then converted it to Flash for delivery."Rieker adds that most of the interactivity he offers comes from QuickTime chapters, as shown here. "Not as flashy as Flash," he concedes, "but quite serviceable." Thomas Fruin, a developer working in Chile, still relies heavily on LiveStage Pro for his projects, which include online agricultural seminars and enhanced historical videos. The main reasons? "Better codecs offering superior quality, and it can just as easily play back short videos or very long ones (one to two hours or more). QuickTime’s superior internal architecture, made accessible by LiveStage, lets me as a developer create a main movie and internally load sub-movies and other rich media components inside the main player." And of course, the advantage of having a standalone player in addition to playback in a browser window, where in Flash you basically have to author your own player.

Rick Workman of Immersionography Associates says that interactivity can mean many things. "We’ve developed a couple of QuickTime-based CD-ROM products. The interaction model we use is based on hotspots in a multi-node QuickTime VR; when the user clicks on a hotspot, a video plays, an information panel pops up, a transition to another VR node takes place, etc. See this demo loop we use in a retail outlet of one of the products."

In addition to QTVR, Workman’s group has come to rely on many of the "less-traveled" features of QuickTime, including skins (which customize the user interface and remove out-of-band clutter from the main viewing area); Flash tracks (for scalable text and graphics; the company’s output supports full-screen delivery, which means different sizes on different monitors); movie tracks (different timelines required for videos/ambient sound loops); Qt lists (to support external higher-level scripting so they don’t have to hardwire this logic inside the host movie); and lots of QScript."

Why not do all this in Flash?
"Certainly the choice of platform biases how things get implemented," Workman says. "When we started these projects, Flash support for VRs (which we considered necessary) was limited, although I’m quite impressed on what’s been done on Flash over the last year. In any case, we’ve got considerable intellectual investment in our current approach, and switching platforms would not be an easy decision. However, given Apple’s current level of disinterest in interactive movies, and the dormant state of LiveStage Pro, I hope Flash will prove up to the task if we need to switch horses."

"QuickTime could have buried Flash by being way better, but Apple chose to do nothing," says Steve Israelson.

But Peter Hoddie is not so sure. "I wouldn’t want to get into a debate about Flash versus QuickTime," he says. "The programs started from different places. Flash started from a vector graphics approach, QuickTime from video."

The Future
"QuickTime will continue to be a big part of the Apple OS," says Wan. "As a result, QuickTime will be pushed into areas of media delivery (including interactivity). However, I think the future direction of QuickTime will largely be based on published standards. The wild wild west days of QuickTime are well behind us."

Hoddie agrees. "Standards are important to the phone companies, the service providers, so the decision to base QuickTime and video around MPEG-4 and ISMA is sound. The mobile market is going to open up a round of opportunities for developers." And it isn’t a foregone conclusion by any means that Flash has the edge in this market. "The Flash guys have been pushing for the mobile market for eight years," he added, "but not with much success."

Of course, the fact that QuickTime is the codec of choice on the wildly popular iPhone suggests that the format will figure heavily in the mobile market for years to come, even if its influence doesn't spread beyond that device.

But the future for pro tools authoring in QuickTime? Wan said it would not be worth the effort unless there is clear direction coming from Apple. "We’ve been waiting for a clear indication of Apple’s intentions regarding QuickTime for a number of years now and don’t really see anything in the near/medium future," he says. "You can’t build products on top of a technology that changes (for the worse with respect to interactivity) with every release, with little to no hope of QuickTime being stable in the future."

Apple is well known for being reticent to talk about future products, so there’s no way of knowing for sure whether and which interactive features of QuickTime will be upgraded and revised for the promise of multimedia on hand-helds and iPhones.

But Casanova seems bullish on the future. "Since QuickTime 6 was released in 2002, we have had full support for the MPEG-4 standard. In fact, the MPEG-4 file format is based on the QuickTime file format, giving QuickTime a DNA-level relationship with the standard. This means that content created in QuickTime interoperates with the widest range of media players and devices in the industry, including iPhone, iPod, and Apple TV. Additionally, hundreds of digital camera makers distribute QuickTime with their products as the video clips captured on the camera can be played back and edited with QuickTime.

"Supporting open, industry standards not only provides interoperability with consumer electronic devices," Casanova says, "but it also means that Apple does not have to create a special version of QuickTime that runs on these devices. This way, Apple can focus on creating high-quality, standards-compliant media on Macs and PCs that play back almost anywhere."