Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Johnathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works in my Heart Radio, and I love
Speaker 1: all things tech. And you know, guys are really enjoy
Speaker 1: watching video content on my computer or on my phone,
Speaker 1: and I watch a lot of stuff online like documentaries, movies, comedies,
Speaker 1: film criticism, web series, video game let's plays all this
Speaker 1: kind of stuff. And it's easy to take for granted
Speaker 1: that we can watch this kind of stuff on our
Speaker 1: devices on demand, wherever we are, whenever we want. But
Speaker 1: it wasn't that long ago when such a thing wasn't
Speaker 1: even possible, especially not without a specialized computer that would
Speaker 1: cost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. But one
Speaker 1: collection of products, one software suite, really helped change all that.
Speaker 1: And this suite would be quick Time. Now, as we're
Speaker 1: going to see in this episode, it gets a little
Speaker 1: tricky to talk about quick time because Apple referred to
Speaker 1: many different components of quick time as quick time. But
Speaker 1: we're gonna build up to that. Just keep in mind
Speaker 1: that when we say quick time, it's more than just
Speaker 1: a video player. It's even more than just a video
Speaker 1: editing system or even a foul format. But we'll we'll
Speaker 1: get there. So the story of quick Time is closely
Speaker 1: tied to that of Apple and the Mac line of computers.
Speaker 1: Apple was really positioning Mac to be the computer for
Speaker 1: creative types, artists, musicians, filmmakers, and that was a calculated
Speaker 1: decision early on, and it paid off. Chances are, if
Speaker 1: you work in the creative industry, if you've been working
Speaker 1: in it for the last say, five to ten years,
Speaker 1: you've been working almost exclusively on Mac computers most likely.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've seen some changes in the more recent years,
Speaker 1: but for the longest time, it meant that if you
Speaker 1: were doing audio editing, video editing, you were working on
Speaker 1: a Mac. Well in the nineteen eighties, this sort of
Speaker 1: got started when you had different people at Apple really
Speaker 1: experimenting with how personal computers could work in this realm.
Speaker 1: There was an engineer at Apple named Steve Perlman who
Speaker 1: tackled the challenge of bringing video playback to personal computers.
Speaker 1: Perlman had been interested in film and television and video
Speaker 1: ever since childhood. He had experimented with clay animation while
Speaker 1: he was in school, and around that same time, which
Speaker 1: was in the nineteen seventies, he decided to build his
Speaker 1: own computer. In the mid nineteen eighties, he was fresh
Speaker 1: out of college and had already worked for companies like
Speaker 1: Colco and Atari, developing graphics, processing, hardware and all that
Speaker 1: on a liberal arts education, so he was largely self
Speaker 1: educated in many of those fields. He joined Apple in
Speaker 1: n and he headed up a project that eventually got
Speaker 1: the name quick Scan. He was part of a team
Speaker 1: of Mac engineers who were working on multimedia support. Multimedia
Speaker 1: was sort of a catch all term, and it essentially
Speaker 1: meant that you were working on software that could display
Speaker 1: more than one form of media, as the name would suggest,
Speaker 1: so maybe it could play audio and show text, or
Speaker 1: also show video or animation. So in the early days
Speaker 1: of multimedia, you couldn't just play digital video on a computer.
Speaker 1: The earlier versions of multimedia technology involved computers controlling external
Speaker 1: media playback devices like a laser disc player, so instead
Speaker 1: of having it native to your computer, you'd have to
Speaker 1: attach a totally independent piece of hardware and control it
Speaker 1: using specialized software and connections, and originally that's all you
Speaker 1: could do. You could just use a computer to control
Speaker 1: the player itself, maybe navigate to different chapters on the
Speaker 1: laser disk, that kind of thing that would end up
Speaker 1: pushing the analog video out to a television set. The
Speaker 1: laser disc player itself would Later on, engineers would develop
Speaker 1: a way to play video on a computer screen within
Speaker 1: a window using essentially was a television tuner, an analog
Speaker 1: tuner that you would plug into an expansion slot on
Speaker 1: a computer. But this was an analog connector, so we're
Speaker 1: not talking about digital media here. It's still an analog signal.
Speaker 1: And I've talked about analog signals versus digital signals in
Speaker 1: the past, but just as a quick refresher, analog signals
Speaker 1: scale to represent a specific value. UH. You would think
Speaker 1: of an analog signal as an analogy of whatever it represents,
Speaker 1: whether that's audio or video or whatever. That's why it's
Speaker 1: called UH. An analog signal, it's an analogy. They are continuous,
Speaker 1: these signals, they can be continuously variable, and a digital
Speaker 1: signal is different. It quantifies the information it is carrying
Speaker 1: in and changes it all into digits, into zeros or ones.
Speaker 1: So an analog thermometer might use liquid mercury to create
Speaker 1: an analogy of your body temperature. So you put the
Speaker 1: thermometer in your mouth. The liquid mercury will then expand
Speaker 1: based on how warm you are, and then you can
Speaker 1: read out the the reading on the thermometer. That's the
Speaker 1: analogy of your body temperature. A digital thermometer would quantize
Speaker 1: the heat measured by the device and then put it
Speaker 1: on a display. Now this does not automatically mean that
Speaker 1: one method is better than the other. The precision of
Speaker 1: the actual measurement is independent of whether it is digital
Speaker 1: or analog. That is a separate thing that has to
Speaker 1: be addressed on its own. But one thing to take
Speaker 1: away from this is that digital and analog are fundamentally
Speaker 1: different approaches, and you need different types of circuits in
Speaker 1: order to process the signals or generate these signals. You
Speaker 1: couldn't send a digital video feed to an analog TV
Speaker 1: tuner in a computer. It wouldn't be able to handle
Speaker 1: that information. One of the limiting factors of bringing video
Speaker 1: into the computer world was really the problem of data.
Speaker 1: How much information that video represents. If you wanted to
Speaker 1: create a color video, if you wanted to to to
Speaker 1: play a color video with sound as a digital file,
Speaker 1: that would require a lot of bits, all those zeros
Speaker 1: and ones in order to manage it, which means that
Speaker 1: file sizes would get incredibly large, particularly by the standards
Speaker 1: of the day, I mean by the nine standards. You
Speaker 1: were talking about computers that when they were you know,
Speaker 1: starting to creep towards the the megabyte storage as you
Speaker 1: were like thinking, this thing is is enormous. Well, these
Speaker 1: files would dwarf that. So you weren't just limited by
Speaker 1: hard drive size for storage, I mean that's one part,
Speaker 1: but you were also limited by how much data throughput
Speaker 1: the buses in your computer were able to manage. And
Speaker 1: a bus is essentially just a pathway. It's a think
Speaker 1: of it as like a highway that data can travel through,
Speaker 1: and the width of the highway tells you how many
Speaker 1: cars can go through at once. So if the bus
Speaker 1: has a lower throughput, if it's a narrower highway, then
Speaker 1: you get bottlenecks. You've got all these cars trying to
Speaker 1: get through, and we're assuming that all the cars can
Speaker 1: travel at the same speed. We're not taking all the
Speaker 1: other elements of traffic into account here, but if you
Speaker 1: have a narrower highway, then fewer cars can pass through
Speaker 1: in any given amount of time. So even if you
Speaker 1: have a very fast processor, it won't do you any
Speaker 1: good if the buses can't have that capacity to carry
Speaker 1: a lot of data for every given unit of time,
Speaker 1: like every second. So how much data are we actually
Speaker 1: talking about? Well, Apple's Advanced Technology Group or a t
Speaker 1: G had an animation team that were determined to create
Speaker 1: a computer animated short using Apple computers for all the
Speaker 1: different production side, they created a three minute presentation called
Speaker 1: Pencil Test, and it's an animated feature that features a
Speaker 1: cute little pencil icon that jumps off a MAX screen
Speaker 1: and it turns into a two dimensional figure inside our
Speaker 1: three dimensional world. And then we follow this little pencil
Speaker 1: graphic as it attempts to try and get back into
Speaker 1: the MAX screen. It's just trying to get home. Fund
Speaker 1: side note, Andrew Stanton worked on this piece. He would
Speaker 1: later go on to write and direct feature length computer
Speaker 1: animated projects at Pixar. Anyway, according to Bruce Leak, who
Speaker 1: would become the lead developed of quick Time, this animated
Speaker 1: demonstration required an enormous amount of effort and resources to produce.
Speaker 1: It took several minutes to render a single frame of animation,
Speaker 1: and there were five thousand frames to get through in
Speaker 1: those three minutes. So to do that, the team devoted
Speaker 1: a couple of dozen Apple computers to start rendering frames.
Speaker 1: Some of them could only render part of a frame
Speaker 1: at a time, and they would have to render another
Speaker 1: part of the frame and then assemble all of that
Speaker 1: at the end of it. Each frame took up about
Speaker 1: a megabyte of storage space, and these computers had between
Speaker 1: forty and eighty megabytes of storage. The entire video would
Speaker 1: represent five gigabytes of data, so this is an enormous
Speaker 1: file that far outstrips the storage capacity of the computers
Speaker 1: that are actually creating the animation. So to get around
Speaker 1: this problem, the team would load about one frames worth
Speaker 1: of animation of time onto a custom digital video storage
Speaker 1: machine that cost around a hundred thousand dollars. Then they
Speaker 1: would export those frames onto videotape, and they built the
Speaker 1: full Pencil Test animated video one hundred frames at a
Speaker 1: time onto videotape until they got all five thousand frames
Speaker 1: on there. This obviously was not something that you could
Speaker 1: load onto a floppy disk and then just plug into
Speaker 1: your average Mac in order to watch. Even though all
Speaker 1: the animation, all the music, all the production was done
Speaker 1: on Max, so you'd actually have to watch it on
Speaker 1: something other than a Mac computer. They couldn't handle playing
Speaker 1: this back, so something would have have to be done
Speaker 1: to manage this sheer amount of information. If future Mac
Speaker 1: computers were to have a practical means of playing video
Speaker 1: on screen, quick Scan would rely upon massively parallel graphic
Speaker 1: animation and video decompression chips. So, in other words, it
Speaker 1: required special hardware, these special chips that you would have
Speaker 1: to install into a comput eater, and Apple doesn't tend
Speaker 1: to like people opening up cases and and messing with
Speaker 1: stuff inside. Typically, the way you would get an upgrade
Speaker 1: on an Apple computer is that you would purchase it
Speaker 1: straight from Apple and you would have them install it,
Speaker 1: or you would just buy a new piece of hardware
Speaker 1: from Apple. So this was not something that would come
Speaker 1: standard with a Macintosh. It would be very, very expensive,
Speaker 1: and ultimately Apple decided that they weren't going to pursue
Speaker 1: quick Scan as a commercial product, but as part of
Speaker 1: the actual development, Perlmand created a video codec called Road Pizza,
Speaker 1: or at least informally called road Pizza. It's usually called
Speaker 1: the Apple video codec. But what is a codec. That's
Speaker 1: a word we used to describe a technology that can
Speaker 1: encode and decode a digital data signal. The word itself
Speaker 1: is a combination of coder and d coder code deck.
Speaker 1: It can be hardware. It typically is software the way
Speaker 1: we talk about today, but it can be a piece
Speaker 1: of hardware as well. And there are lots of different
Speaker 1: types of codex. There's not just one single version. Some
Speaker 1: are used to convert analog signals to digital signals or
Speaker 1: vice versa. Some are used as a compression technique to
Speaker 1: reduce the file size for digital information to make it
Speaker 1: manageable for the purposes of playback storage and transfers. But
Speaker 1: they all take some form of input and transform it
Speaker 1: in some way. If you have the same codec on
Speaker 1: two ends, like if one person has a CODEC on
Speaker 1: their machine and you have a codec on your machine,
Speaker 1: it's the same codec, then you can use that to
Speaker 1: encode information, send it to your friend. They receive it,
Speaker 1: they can then run it through the codec which will
Speaker 1: decode that information back into its original format, and then
Speaker 1: they can do whatever they need to do with it.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, you can do stuff like compress
Speaker 1: it or change the style of signal. So interestingly, Apple
Speaker 1: would announce that it was working on a multimedia enabling product.
Speaker 1: They had a name for it, they called it quick Time,
Speaker 1: and they announced this in n at a conference, So
Speaker 1: this was public information, but behind the scenes, there were
Speaker 1: only a few people who were even aware that Apple
Speaker 1: was trying to pursue such a thing, and very few
Speaker 1: people were actually attached to the project. Bruce Leak would
Speaker 1: end up actually kind of volunteering for this. He heard
Speaker 1: about the project from this conference, didn't know anything else
Speaker 1: about it. He hadn't heard anything internally about it, but
Speaker 1: he had just started wrapping up work on a previous
Speaker 1: project he was in charge of over at Apple and
Speaker 1: thought that this was a really interesting challenge. So he
Speaker 1: said in a panel discussion in two thousand eighteen that
Speaker 1: he and others had to actually ask around about this
Speaker 1: because they all thought it was a cool project, and
Speaker 1: ultimately they ended up there because Apple had sort of
Speaker 1: made this commitment that they were going to create this
Speaker 1: this software suite, but they did not yet have a
Speaker 1: roadmap on how to actually get there. In fact, originally
Speaker 1: Apple was talking about collaborating with third parties to develop
Speaker 1: this multi media enabling platform. Ultimately, they would choose to
Speaker 1: not do that. They decided to do it all internally.
Speaker 1: Carlman's quick Scan would never become a commercial product, as
Speaker 1: I mentioned before, largely because it had that specialized chip,
Speaker 1: but the road Pizza codec lived on to become part
Speaker 1: of quick Time, so part of the quick Scan project
Speaker 1: would become an integral part of the quick Time suite.
Speaker 1: Much of what would become quick Time emerged from various
Speaker 1: research teams within Apple's Advanced Technology Group or a t G,
Speaker 1: including the compression methodology. So this wasn't necessarily one group
Speaker 1: for people who just started programming. They actually drew upon
Speaker 1: the expertise and the contributions of lots of different people
Speaker 1: at Apple who happened to be working on related technologies
Speaker 1: at the time. So let's talk about compression for a second.
Speaker 1: That's tricky stuff. Not only do you have to figure
Speaker 1: out how to maintain the integrity of the information you
Speaker 1: planned to store or to send while it takes up
Speaker 1: less space with video, you have another issue. You have
Speaker 1: to figure out an efficient way to unpack it. You
Speaker 1: have to how how to decompress it. Efficiently, because if
Speaker 1: it takes too long to decompress when you want to
Speaker 1: play the video back, you get delays in playback, and
Speaker 1: that is frustrating. No one would have wanted to use
Speaker 1: quick time if it took a really long time from
Speaker 1: pushing the play button to actually getting video to play back.
Speaker 1: So that was a big challenge. The other big challenge, obviously,
Speaker 1: is how do you compress stuff without losing too much data.
Speaker 1: That's the problem with lossy formats, and I've talked about
Speaker 1: that a lot in previous episodes. A lossy format is
Speaker 1: one in which you essentially get rid of any information
Speaker 1: that is deemed to be superfluous, unnecessary, what have you.
Speaker 1: All that gets tossed aside because if you can't see
Speaker 1: it or perceive it, then it doesn't really matter, and
Speaker 1: then you just keep the absolutely necessary stuff. In that way,
Speaker 1: you can shrink file sizes, but that obviously raises questions
Speaker 1: as to who determines what is acceptable for loss So
Speaker 1: these were big problems that they had to tackle, but
Speaker 1: they got to work on it. And I'll talk a
Speaker 1: little bit more about their development process in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: During the development of quick Time, Leak and his team
Speaker 1: encountered lots of different challenges. One was just getting the
Speaker 1: timing right on video and sound and making sure that
Speaker 1: they would stay in synchronous station. As Leak would say
Speaker 1: in the February panel discussion at the Computer History Museum event,
Speaker 1: we think of video as playing back at thirty frames
Speaker 1: or sixty fields per second. I talked about that in
Speaker 1: the r c A podcasts recently, but Leak said, in reality,
Speaker 1: it's more like fifty nine point nine seven frames per second,
Speaker 1: which is really close, but uh, it can make a
Speaker 1: difference over time. If your video is just a few
Speaker 1: seconds or a couple of minutes long, the differences might
Speaker 1: not really get to be noticeable, but as videos get longer,
Speaker 1: that discrepancy can lead to the audio and video getting
Speaker 1: further and further out of synchronization, which becomes really distracting
Speaker 1: over time. And they wanted their tool to scale up
Speaker 1: so that they could be used for longer videos, so
Speaker 1: they had to be more precise when designing the encoding tools.
Speaker 1: Another challenge was reading information from c d s. Early on,
Speaker 1: as a computer would seek out information on a CD,
Speaker 1: you would actually have to find where in the c
Speaker 1: D the data was located. Everything else on the computer
Speaker 1: would just stop. Essentially, the computer is thing, hang on second,
Speaker 1: I'm looking for that for you, But you don't want
Speaker 1: that to happen while you're watching video either. So Apple
Speaker 1: engineers had to work really hard to come up with
Speaker 1: solutions that would allow for a CD ROM to seek
Speaker 1: out information in the background in anticipation of when it
Speaker 1: would need to pull that data for playback purposes. And
Speaker 1: so there was some hardware stuff they were working on,
Speaker 1: not just the software side. They also brought on an
Speaker 1: audio teams so that QuickTime would be able to work
Speaker 1: with multiple channels of audio, and that it would be
Speaker 1: able to work with different sample rates and sample sizes
Speaker 1: of audio and mix them all down to work with video.
Speaker 1: So this would involve converting all that audio into a
Speaker 1: single format that would work with the associated video files
Speaker 1: no matter what format the original audio is in. The
Speaker 1: result was a suite of soft where that was remarkably
Speaker 1: useful and innovative for the time. So, for example, if
Speaker 1: you were watching a video on your home machine and
Speaker 1: your processor didn't quite have the umph to keep up
Speaker 1: with demands, rather than have the video stall out or
Speaker 1: two worse, have the videos start to lag behind the audio.
Speaker 1: Quick Time would adjust the frame rate. You would get
Speaker 1: fewer frames per second. That would end up making the
Speaker 1: action a little more jittery and jagged, but the action
Speaker 1: would stay in sync with the soundtrack. So instead of
Speaker 1: the video slowing down with the same number of frames
Speaker 1: and the audio getting more and more out of sync,
Speaker 1: the video would just cut out, uh, interstitial pictures. So
Speaker 1: you might say, all right, well, to keep up with
Speaker 1: the audio, we're gonna cut frames two, three, We'll keep four,
Speaker 1: so we'll go from one to four to seven to
Speaker 1: ten or whatever. This does make it much more jittery,
Speaker 1: as I said, but at least you're sticking with the
Speaker 1: audio instead of having the audio quickly get ahead of
Speaker 1: what you're watching. Now, if you were using a then
Speaker 1: current Mac two C I system that would be the
Speaker 1: a standard Mac at the time that quick Time was released,
Speaker 1: you would be able to play a video at a
Speaker 1: blistering ten whole frames per second at a resolution of
Speaker 1: a hundred sixty by one pixels. And yeah, being a
Speaker 1: little facetious with that description, film plays back at twenty
Speaker 1: four frames per second um. If you have stop motion animation.
Speaker 1: A lot of stop motion animators would animate at twelve
Speaker 1: frames per second in order to kind of save a
Speaker 1: little bit on labor. But typically you want to stick
Speaker 1: too closer to twenty four and as I said, standard
Speaker 1: video is closer to thirty. They managed ten, but still
Speaker 1: it was a phenomenal achievement. Together, the team was able
Speaker 1: to meet the goal of getting a multimedia enabling product
Speaker 1: ready to ship within a year. Bruce Leak showed off
Speaker 1: the product at the Worldwide Developers Conference in May nine.
Speaker 1: The video he showed at that event was Apple's iconic
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four commercial for the Macintosh, one of the
Speaker 1: most famous commercials of all time, directed by none other
Speaker 1: than Ridley Scott. The beta version for quick Time would
Speaker 1: become available in the summer of nineteen and the finished
Speaker 1: product followed on December two. The first third party product
Speaker 1: to feature the technology was a CD rom book on
Speaker 1: desk called From Alice to Ocean, which was about various
Speaker 1: locations across Australia. Sorry Australians, I didn't mean to butcher
Speaker 1: your accent. The original release of quick Time included three
Speaker 1: codex One was the Apple video codec, essentially Road Pizza
Speaker 1: and that one was meant for live video, The second
Speaker 1: codek was responsible for coding and decoding animation, and the
Speaker 1: third was a codec for eight bit images. Many many
Speaker 1: others would follow for a quick Time over the years.
Speaker 1: Quake Time also included a player, probably the most famous
Speaker 1: part of the quick Time suite. It also had a players. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it's a piece of software cabable of playing back files
Speaker 1: saved in the quick Time time file format. And this
Speaker 1: is where we start running into a problem, actually, or
Speaker 1: at least a frustrating issue. Apple began referring to the codec,
Speaker 1: the player, and the file format as quick Time, so
Speaker 1: all three of these different things got the same name. However,
Speaker 1: over time the software would change, and as digital archivist
Speaker 1: Becca Bender wrote in her paper Too Many quick Times,
Speaker 1: which by the way, is a great read. It's a
Speaker 1: very short read. I recommend you you seek it out.
Speaker 1: It makes it really tricky to have a meaningful conversation
Speaker 1: about quick Time. There are two different media players that
Speaker 1: have the name quick Time. I'll talk about those a
Speaker 1: little bit later. There are two different and actually incompatible
Speaker 1: file types, and they're they're both not only are they
Speaker 1: called quick Time, they both have the same file type
Speaker 1: designation of dot m o V, though, to make things
Speaker 1: even more confusing, they can also be dot QT. And
Speaker 1: there is a codec called quick time. Not all quick
Speaker 1: times are equal. And this the reason this is a
Speaker 1: big deal, you might wonder, well, why do you care?
Speaker 1: Is that should you ever need to access a specific
Speaker 1: video file from say an archive, Let's say, do you
Speaker 1: know of a digital video you need to get access
Speaker 1: to it? It's useful to know whether you'll be able
Speaker 1: to play it given particular software or equipment that you
Speaker 1: have available. And I'll talk more about that a little
Speaker 1: bit later. And while I'm on the subject of confusion,
Speaker 1: if you are a gamer, you're likely familiar with the
Speaker 1: concept of quick time events, but that is a different thing.
Speaker 1: Quick time events don't have anything to do with Apple's
Speaker 1: quick time. The QuickTime event quick time in those cases
Speaker 1: are two separate words quick time, the product from Apple
Speaker 1: is done as one word quick time. Now. Not only
Speaker 1: was QuickTime a pioneer product for computer video, it was
Speaker 1: the first Apple system software product to be sold on
Speaker 1: its own. Previous system software products would come pre installed
Speaker 1: on new hardware, which would leave out anyone who already
Speaker 1: owned a Mac So if you bought a Mac and
Speaker 1: then this new software came out, the only option you
Speaker 1: would have is to take your existing Mac to a
Speaker 1: licensed Apple dealership and have them install the new software
Speaker 1: on your computer. You couldn't just buy it off the shelf,
Speaker 1: but quick Time change that. You could actually go to
Speaker 1: a store, you could buy it out of a box.
Speaker 1: You could bring it home and install it on your
Speaker 1: own machine. That precedent would be followed by numerous Apple
Speaker 1: system software products, including the Systems seven operating system update
Speaker 1: for Mac os that was first of of Apple's Maco
Speaker 1: S versions to be sold in its own retail box.
Speaker 1: But quick Time also became available as a free download
Speaker 1: with limited features. This was before the days of the
Speaker 1: Worldwide Web, so users would have to dial into a
Speaker 1: bulletin board system or BBS to download the system extension
Speaker 1: for their Mac computers. Now, initially quick Time was only
Speaker 1: for Max, but the team reluctantly had to face harsh reality,
Speaker 1: which was there were a lot of IBM PC compatible
Speaker 1: machines out there, a lot of Windows machines out there
Speaker 1: tons in fact, and if they wanted to establish their
Speaker 1: new format, they were going to have to develop a
Speaker 1: version of quick Time for Windows. They figured it wouldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily have all the features of the Mac version, but
Speaker 1: it should at the very least allow for playback features.
Speaker 1: No one was eager to jump on that project. According
Speaker 1: to one of the team members, it was seen as
Speaker 1: an unpleasant task. Or to directly quote team member Peter
Speaker 1: Hattie quote, it's hard to understate how much that was
Speaker 1: seen as pure evil end quote. So in not long
Speaker 1: after releasing quick Time for Mac, Apple contracted with another
Speaker 1: company called the San Francisco Canyon Company to support the
Speaker 1: quick Time tools to Windows. The first quick Time for
Speaker 1: Windows released on in November in But while Apple's intent
Speaker 1: was to disseminate quick Time across a wide variety of computers,
Speaker 1: engineers at Apple smelled something fishy the following year, so
Speaker 1: you see, they contract with this company, San Francisco Canon Company,
Speaker 1: to help develop the quick Time for Windows. Then Microsoft
Speaker 1: comes to that same company and hires them to work
Speaker 1: on Microsoft's videos software on the Windows platform. It's called
Speaker 1: Video for Windows, and specifically they wanted them to work
Speaker 1: on video for Windows that would be running on machines
Speaker 1: that had Intel processors. In the new Video for Windows
Speaker 1: program debuted and Apple engineers suspected that the contractor had
Speaker 1: actually included some of Apple's code in Microsoft's product, so
Speaker 1: Apple sued San Francisco Canyon Company. On December six, Apple
Speaker 1: sought and received a restraining order against Microsoft from distributing
Speaker 1: video for Windows. So Microsoft responded by stripping out all
Speaker 1: the code that the San Francisco Canyon Company had contributed
Speaker 1: to that product. A couple of years later, it became
Speaker 1: clear just how ugly the fight had become between Apple
Speaker 1: and Microsoft. It was pretty vicious. Apple had been threatening
Speaker 1: to sue Microsoft for several billion dollars over a couple
Speaker 1: of major things, one of them being this QuickTime disagreement,
Speaker 1: and Microsoft in turn was threatening to cancel the publication
Speaker 1: of Office uh for for mac So the Office Suite,
Speaker 1: which was an incredibly popular productivity suite still is what
Speaker 1: would no longer be supported for for Macintosh. And then
Speaker 1: there was also issues with web browsers. It just got
Speaker 1: really ugly, with both teams saying oh yeah, well, if
Speaker 1: you do that, I'm going to do this, and eventually
Speaker 1: they settled out of court. Microsoft would end up purchasing
Speaker 1: a hundred fifty million dollars of non voter stock in Apple.
Speaker 1: Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default Mac operating
Speaker 1: system browser at least until Safari really debuted, and there
Speaker 1: were other considerations that were made as well. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it was not a pretty thing for a long time.
Speaker 1: While all that was going on, Apple engineers continued to
Speaker 1: work on an update quick Time, releasing new features and
Speaker 1: fixing bugs as they found them. Quick Time, too added
Speaker 1: support for what was essentially MIDI files and equipment. I
Speaker 1: did episodes about MIDI a while back, so if you
Speaker 1: want to learn about that fascinating technology, you should go
Speaker 1: check those out. It's m I d I, really neat technology. However,
Speaker 1: the MIDI support would not stick around with quick Time forever.
Speaker 1: That's a bit of a spoiler alert. Before I get
Speaker 1: into that next bit, let's take another quick break to
Speaker 1: thank our sponsor. Now, I'm not gonna go through each
Speaker 1: and every version of quick Time to talk about all
Speaker 1: the features that were added or tweaked, because that would
Speaker 1: be super dull, But I will hit some highlights and
Speaker 1: also talk about some of the software that helped raise
Speaker 1: awareness of quick Time and some of the products to
Speaker 1: A big one was popular game that came out way
Speaker 1: back in from a developer called Cyan. That would be
Speaker 1: the infamous puzzle game Missed, in which you would try
Speaker 1: to solve a series of really tricky puzzles to work
Speaker 1: your way through narrative um and had lots and lots
Speaker 1: of quick time video in it as kind of the
Speaker 1: beginning of an era of of games that would incorporate
Speaker 1: video to various degrees of success or hilarious degrees of failure,
Speaker 1: depending upon your point of view. Software wasn't the only
Speaker 1: source for QuickTime content, however, It's easy to forget. Streaming
Speaker 1: video has not been around that long. Before you had
Speaker 1: platforms like YouTube. Online video creators typically would upload their
Speaker 1: video files to a server, and then users would download
Speaker 1: the video files. That's how I watched the first few
Speaker 1: seasons of the web series Red Versus Blue. I would
Speaker 1: visit the site each week looking for the latest episode,
Speaker 1: and I would download it to my computer. You couldn't
Speaker 1: just watch it in your browser. You actually had to
Speaker 1: download the file and then watch it on your computer
Speaker 1: from storage. It would take ages because I did not
Speaker 1: have very fast internet connectivity at that time and the
Speaker 1: files were pretty big. Now, you could watch the episodes
Speaker 1: on a quick time player or with red Versus Blue.
Speaker 1: Windows Media Player also would support it. This wasn't an
Speaker 1: ideal solution for content creators either, because they would often
Speaker 1: have to pay large fees for all that data moving
Speaker 1: across the network. Rooster Teeth, the company that makes Red
Speaker 1: Versus Blue, was paying a bill that was in the
Speaker 1: thirteen th dollars per month range. That's not a small
Speaker 1: amount of cash. With quick Time three and on, Apple
Speaker 1: would release the basic suite of software for free. Users
Speaker 1: could opt to pay for a more feature rich version
Speaker 1: with a purchase of a quick Time Pro license. That
Speaker 1: version could also read lots of different image file formatsically
Speaker 1: stuff like gif I refused to say, jeff and jpeg
Speaker 1: images as well. Outside of Apple, the I S O
Speaker 1: I e C. Motion Pictures Expert Group was working to
Speaker 1: establish standards to encode audio visual objects under the collective
Speaker 1: designation of MPEG four. During this process, several entities, including Apple,
Speaker 1: suggested that the group use Apple's quick Time file format
Speaker 1: as a basis. That's the one that uses the file
Speaker 1: extension designation of dot m o V or dot QT,
Speaker 1: but dot imo V is way more popular, and just
Speaker 1: to say, like, let's start from here as our our
Speaker 1: foundation for this standard approach. This was Steve jobs big
Speaker 1: plan for the quick Time team when he returned to Apple.
Speaker 1: He had been sort of in exile for a few years,
Speaker 1: and when he came back. One of the things he
Speaker 1: did as he told the QuickTime team, we should make
Speaker 1: quick Time the standard for computer video, and that they
Speaker 1: were going to do this by reviewing proposals that the
Speaker 1: IMPEG group had accepted in the past. He was saying,
Speaker 1: let's look and see what they like, and then let's
Speaker 1: make sure we write a proposal that writes toward the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that they have accepted in the past,
Speaker 1: and now I'll give us our best chance. And it worked.
Speaker 1: Now that's not to say that the dot m ov
Speaker 1: files became the new standard, but rather the starting point
Speaker 1: for developing that standard. The QuickTime file format formed the
Speaker 1: foundation that's a lot of alliteration for the I s
Speaker 1: O base media file format also known as i B
Speaker 1: m FF catchy, and in Apple released QuickTime four, which
Speaker 1: includes support for streaming video. Apple also published the QuickTime
Speaker 1: streaming server software right at that same time. So now
Speaker 1: we're finally seeing streaming video kind of making its way
Speaker 1: into QuickTime support. But again that it would take. It
Speaker 1: would take the formation of several platforms like YouTube for
Speaker 1: streaming video to actually become a, you know, a reality
Speaker 1: for the average Internet user. QuickTime six, which came out
Speaker 1: in two thousand two, was the first version to support
Speaker 1: the MPEG four format for playback and for import and export.
Speaker 1: It also supported the Flash five standard. Later, Apple updated
Speaker 1: the QuickTime file format built on ibm FF, they retained
Speaker 1: the file extension dot m o V. So now you've
Speaker 1: got two different QuickTime file formats, one pre ibm FF,
Speaker 1: one post ibm FF, and we typically call them QuickTime
Speaker 1: File Format Classic and QuickTime File Format Current. By the way,
Speaker 1: if you have a QuickTime file format a dot m
Speaker 1: o V file in front of you, it is not
Speaker 1: necessarily easy to tell which kind you have, whether it
Speaker 1: was pre or post IBMFF. You can't really tell just
Speaker 1: by looking at it. You typically have to get more
Speaker 1: information first. If your player software can work with either
Speaker 1: type of file, you're all set. You could watch it
Speaker 1: no matter what, so it doesn't really matter to you
Speaker 1: which format it's in if you can just watch it
Speaker 1: either way. But then for Mac users you've got quick
Speaker 1: Time Player ten or player x, it's it's the room
Speaker 1: in numeral ten that released in two thousand nine, and
Speaker 1: that changed things up considerably. First, the name was already
Speaker 1: a little confusing because the version of quick Time immediately
Speaker 1: before ten was version seven. I guess seven eight nine.
Speaker 1: Uh No, Apple chose to name quick Time ten that
Speaker 1: way because it would align with OS ten. So I'm
Speaker 1: going to give that one a pass. But the real
Speaker 1: trouble is that quick Time ten mar to departure from
Speaker 1: Apple and its support of creators, something that was a
Speaker 1: bit of a theme across multiple software suites like Garage
Speaker 1: Band and Final Cut. Gone was the support from Middie,
Speaker 1: so it's no longer in quick Time. Gone was the
Speaker 1: frame counter indicator. Gone were some of the playback options.
Speaker 1: Gone was the ability to playback video that had been
Speaker 1: encoded with Road Pizza or Apple Animation. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: the stuff that was the formation of the earliest versions
Speaker 1: of quick Time, those were no longer compatible with the
Speaker 1: most current version of quick Time. You could not play
Speaker 1: all QuickTime files even with this quick Time playback software,
Speaker 1: which seems counterintuitive. Uh So it does get a bit confusing.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nine, Apple began to transition over from
Speaker 1: the foundation of quick Time which is called qt Kit,
Speaker 1: sort of the underlying framework for it and they began
Speaker 1: to shift toward a different technology called a v foundation.
Speaker 1: That continued with the release of mac Os ten Lion,
Speaker 1: which happened in October. Apples released iTunes ten point five
Speaker 1: for Windows, which actually did away with the necessity for
Speaker 1: Windows users to install quick Time. It didn't include quick
Speaker 1: Time in the installation. You didn't have to have quick
Speaker 1: Time on your computer to run iTunes. This was brand new.
Speaker 1: All other previous versions of iTunes required quick Time, so
Speaker 1: this appeared to be the beginning of the end for
Speaker 1: the venerable software in Apple chose to end support for
Speaker 1: quick Time for Windows. Now, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people out there who still have quick Time installed on
Speaker 1: their Windows machines. That is a bad idea because it
Speaker 1: could serve as a point of vulnerability for your computer.
Speaker 1: It could provide the opportunity for a hacker to target
Speaker 1: and exploit that software and get access to your computer
Speaker 1: or perhaps install malware on your machine. And the reason
Speaker 1: why this is a problem is when a company stops
Speaker 1: supporting software, they no longer issue updates to it, which
Speaker 1: means they can no longer patch any vulnerabilities that are found,
Speaker 1: So any vulnerabilities that are discovered continue to be vulnerabilities.
Speaker 1: So it's a good idea to uninstall QuickTime on a
Speaker 1: Windows machine if you happen to have it on one
Speaker 1: of those seekle and alternative like VLC Media Player. By
Speaker 1: the way, this isn't just me offering this advice. The
Speaker 1: Department of Homeland Security said the same thing. In in
Speaker 1: Apple announced that it in its effort to move from
Speaker 1: thirty two bit apps to sixty four bit apps, it
Speaker 1: would be phasing out support for older software, and that
Speaker 1: includes older versions of quick Time, including the quick Time
Speaker 1: seven player, which had remained an optional installation from mac
Speaker 1: os ten snow Leopard even as the quick Time Player
Speaker 1: ten was released. So you might have wanted to keep
Speaker 1: quick Time seven because it had some options that QuickTime
Speaker 1: ten got rid of, including the ability to play those
Speaker 1: older QuickTime files. But now they those pieces of software
Speaker 1: will fail without compromise because of this move from the
Speaker 1: thirty two bit to the sixty four bit approach for apps.
Speaker 1: So yikes. So you could argue that QuickTime is largely
Speaker 1: obsolete today. It was very important for establishing computer video,
Speaker 1: but today it's not nearly as instrumental technology. Uh, it
Speaker 1: is definitely obsolete on Windows machines, so things like HTML
Speaker 1: five have done away with the need for external players
Speaker 1: online like web browsers can natively play a lot of
Speaker 1: media now thanks to the the the the features of
Speaker 1: HTML five. Apple still supports quick Time for mac os ten,
Speaker 1: but the last date was ten point four and that
Speaker 1: came out several years ago, so we're kind of sun
Speaker 1: setting it now. One other thing I do want to
Speaker 1: mention before I conclude is that an interesting thing about
Speaker 1: quick time was that it gave opportunities for developers to
Speaker 1: create time based synchronized apps that weren't necessarily video playback.
Speaker 1: Apps like the tools for quick Time were so dependent
Speaker 1: upon keeping accurate time that developers could leverage that and
Speaker 1: create software for other applications that also relied heavily on
Speaker 1: keeping accurate time, stuff like scientific measurement software. I think
Speaker 1: that's pretty darn cool that it all came out of
Speaker 1: a desire to be able to play video on a
Speaker 1: computer screen. Anyway, that wraps up this retrospect on quick
Speaker 1: time and it's importance in technology. I look forward to
Speaker 1: doing a lot more episodes kind of like this as
Speaker 1: well as the ones where I focus on companies and
Speaker 1: people and other types of tech. If you have suggestions
Speaker 1: for topics, send them to me. The email addresses tech
Speaker 1: stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can
Speaker 1: pop on over to tech stuff podcast dot com. That's
Speaker 1: our website you'll find other ways to contact me. You'll
Speaker 1: also see a link to our merchandise store that's over
Speaker 1: at t public dot com slash tech stuff. Every purchase
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