By Prince McLean

Published: 10:10 AM EST

A New Trajectory for QuickTime

The next year in 1999, Apple delivered Final Cut Pro (previous page) running on the new PowerMac G3 with FireWire DV support. The new product served as a low cost demonstration of the power of QuickTime, and offered to do a lot of the work that previously required access to an expensive Avid studio. Apple also released the new iMovie as a consumer version of its QuickTime editor to replace Avid Cinema.

By the end of the year, it had also released QuickTime 4.0--which added support for Internet streaming using standard, open protocols and even offered its QuickTime Streaming Server as an open source project. QuickTime 4.0's new player (below) departed from the standard Mac user interface guidelines in an attempt to mimic a real device, with a rotary volume control, multiple slide out panels--similar to the drawers that would later show up in Mac OS X--and the brushed metal appearance that debuted in Final Cut Pro. It gained vocal critics for doing so.



In 2000, Apple presented Mac OS X Developer Preview 3, which incorporated a brushed metal appearance within the new Aqua for QuickTime Player (below). Compared to the bright white stripes on standard windows, brushed metal looked restrained and sophisticated. Other user interface gadgetry of the Mac OS 9 version were left behind.



Starting with the 2000 Mac OS X Public Beta, the revised Aqua-Metal QuickTime Player (below) incorporated QuickTime TV channels for accessing content from Apple's partners in an effort to leverage QuickTime's popularity for movie playback to enter the streaming market. Phil Schiller, who Apple had brought in from Macromedia to serve as its VP of Worldwide Product Marketing, called QuickTime TV "the fastest growing network of live and on-demand streaming audio and video."



New Applications for QuickTime

The work Apple had invested in porting the QuickTime Media Layer to other platforms also paid off, as Apple was able to use it as the foundation for porting the System 7 Mac APIs to run on its new Unix-based operating system from NeXT. Called Carbon, it allowed developers to get their existing applications prepared to run on Mac OS X with much less effort than they'd feared.

As Apple struggled to convince third party developers that the Mac platform would be worth investing in, the outstanding success of Final Cut Pro demonstrated that the company would be well served by acquiring and build its own applications. Apple subsequently bought DVDirector, its development team, and the related DVD technology portfolio from Astarte GmBH in 2000, and released the product the next year as DVD Studio Pro to support an emerging new market of pro, freelance, and small corporate film studios producing their own DVDs.

In 2002, Apple acquired Nothing Real for Shake, its high end video compositing software, and then bought Emagic, a German software developer of the Logic professional level music studio tools. It also began rapidly assembling a consumer suite of QuickTime-based applications, adding iTunes and iDVD to iMovie in 2001, and iPhoto the following year.

By the release of Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple had professional and consumer suites of QuickTime-based applications to show off the advantages of the new Mac platform. It continued with GarageBand, Motion, and Aperture, and delivered regular updates to its existing applications over the same period, as detailed in Why Apple Bounced Back.

New QuickTime Hardware

It also worked to rapidly evolve QuickTime to support new hardware products. QuickTime 5.0 shipped in 2001, just three months after Apple introduced iTunes 1.0 (below, for Mac OS 9). Apple had acquired the popular SoundJam MP and designed an entirely new interface to create iTunes, using the brushed metal appearance of iMovie and QuickTime Player.

In October of that year, Apple unveiled the first iPod along with support provided by iTunes 2.0 for both Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X 10.1. The new version added features including an equalizer and crossfade, but retained an identical interface.



The next year, Apple incorporated support for MPEG-4 part 2 and AAC audio in QuickTime 6.0, and in 2003, iTunes 4.0 supplied pioneering support for AAC encoding and playback, which enabled the new iTunes Music Store. That subsequently pushed the rapid adoption of the new AAC standard and maintained the availability of commercial music for the Mac at a time when Sony and Microsoft were promoting digital downloads that only worked with Windows, as described in the article Rise of the iTunes Killers Myth. Six months later, iTunes for Windows and the new Mac OS X 10.3 Panther were released in October.

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger & QuickTime 7

The popularity of the iPod, fueled in part by the underlying power of QuickTime in iTunes, helped to fund further investment in software that resulted in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's QuickTime 7 in 2005. It delivered support for MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264, or AVC), which would subsequently enable hardware-based video decoding in the new video iPods offered later that year and launch Apple into the TV and Movie business with the iTunes Store.

Because it dropped support for the Classic Mac OS, QuickTime 7 could also begin using the native Quartz engine (Core Graphics) for screen drawing, which allowed for live resizing of windows during playback. Video was painted on the screen as an OpenGL surface. QuickTime 7 also introduced Quartz Composer animations and could support Core Image filters on live video via Core Video. The old Mac Sound Manager was also replaced with the new Core Audio, for high resolution, 24-bit sound. Apple also introduced the QTKit, a Cocoa framework for QuickTime development.

After the release of Tiger, iTunes gained video and podcasting support, and was at version 6 by the end of the year, skipping thorough just four months of 5.x after two years of 4.x. Version 5.0 had introduced the new unified look similar to Leopard, which has only been moderately tweaked since, two major version numbers later. It appears iTunes was the Guinea Pig for experimenting with interface elements; iTunes 7.0 added Cover Flow last year, for example. It also debuted iPod Games, which while having little to do with Leopard, appears to similarly be testing out the model for secure distribution of software on mobile devices, and may likely be used as the official way to install software on the iPhone next spring, as the article Steve Jobs Ends iPhone SDK Panic noted.

On page 4 of 4: New QuickTime Features in Leopard; Quicktime Applications in Leopard; QuickTime Streaming Server; and HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.