A quick look at Apple's QuickTime

Computerworld - I've taken the past few months to research some new technologies and work on implementations with the goal of sharing what I've learned.
This month's topic is QuickTime. I've chosen it because a new version is expected with the much-anticipated release of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), and because there are so many facets to this technology that aren't widely understood.
What exactly is QuickTime? I've asked quite a few people and received different answers from each of them -- and yet each answer was correct and can be broken down into two parts.
In the first instance, QuickTime is an enabling technology, a development layer/object that can be used in Macintosh and Windows programs to handle the work associated with graphic, sound and motion input and output. Developers who choose to use QuickTime can simplify their code and focus on the unique functionality of their applications rather than worrying about various methods of media I/O on multiple platforms.
Using the QuickTime development environment allows an application creator to output to many platforms and environments. That output is the second, and perhaps more familiar, instance of QuickTime: It is a media player, editor and file format. Wow! Yes, QuickTime is often thought of as the standard QuickTime Player installed on millions of PCs and Macs worldwide. The player is standard and free to end users, providing them with access to movies, music and other forms of digitized content. For $29.95, a customer can unlock the free player and use QuickTime Pro, a significantly more robust application that offers basic editing features, full-screen display and the ability to save media files to a variety of file formats.
QuickTime can read and write to many different file formats, in large part because QuickTime was introduced in 1991 and the folks at Apple have never removed a file format or codec from the application -- making it the perfect media vault for long-term storage for most media files.
More important is the new MPEG-4 file format, a global multimedia standard designed to provide high-quality audio and video streams over a range of bandwidths, from cell phone to broadband. MPEG-4 is actually based on the QuickTime file format, which opened the door to a number of standards-based formats. Those standard formats include .3gp, .3g2, .mp4 as well as other formats supported over the years, such as .aif, .jpg, .pct and .mpg, to name a few. How's that for versatility? It's this versatility that has led to QuickTime's distribution success. More than 450,000 copies of