We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple’s QuickTime.
QuickTime isn’t a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more.
↫ Howard Oakley
As a Windows users before I switched to the Mac somewhere in 2003 or 2004 or so, I mostly associated QuickTime with an annoying piece of crapware I sometimes had to install to watch videos, despite my Windows installation being perfectly capable of playing a whole slew of video codecs just fine. To make matters worse, Apple eventually started forcing Windows users to also install their auto-update tool that ran in the background, which would occasionally just… Install stuff without your permission.
Of course, QuickTime was a whole lot more than that, especially on the Mac, where it was simply a core technology of the Mac operating system and the name of the built-in video player. It also served as underpinnings for a whole slew of related technologies, from movie editors like iMovie to the QuickTime streaming tools included in Mac OS X Server, so odds are that somehow, somewhere, you’ve used QuickTime in your life time.
I’m not entirely ashamed to admit I had to check if QuickTime was still part of macOS today – I haven’t actively used macOS since, I think, the Snow Leopard days in 2009 – but it obviously has been sunset quite a while ago in favour of AVFoundation, which macOS still uses today.
I couldn’t have put it better.
Media Player Classic was a godsend with its codec pack
And VLC just made all other players redundant for me. I use it for all video playback when in gui (mplayer2 in cli via framebuffer but vlc-nox also works great and the ncurses interface is really neat and innovative.)
On my early 2000s PC I distinctively remember noticing that MP3s sounded better on QuickTime than on Winamp.
It was a nightmare having to install, Real Player, Quicktime, Xvid, etc to be able to watch the videos in the early internet but also in the CD-ROMs that were shipped with some magazines. When I discovered K-Lite Codec Pack it was a godsend but even so it touched Windows components like the Windows media framework (I don’t remember the real name) and it could break things). Nowadays I am mostly served by VLC and SMPlayer without corrupting Windows but even so from time to time I find videos with strange old codes that I can’t watch.