QT Video Format

What is QT video format? The QuickTime, QT video format (.mov, .qt), is a file format for storing and playing back movies with sound. Though developed and supported primarily by Apple Computer, this flexible format isn't limited to Macintosh operating systems. It's also commonly used in Windows systems, and other types of computing platforms. In Windows, QT video file formats usually appear with the .mov filename extension.

QuickTime is available for Mac OS X and Windows operating systems, and is distributed free of charge. Some other free player applications that rely on the QuickTime framework provide features not available in the basic QuickTime Player. For example: iTunes can export audio in WAV, AIFF, MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless.

In Mac OS X, a simple AppleScript can be used to play a movie in full-screen mode. However, since version 7.2 the QuickTime Player now also supports full-screen viewing in the non-pro version.

Any application can be written to access features provided by the QuickTime framework. Other file formats that QuickTime supports natively (to varying degrees) include AIFF, WAV, DV, MP3, and MPEG-1. With additional QT video format extensions, it can also support Ogg, ASF, FLV, MKV, DivX Media Format, and others.

The QT video format functions as a multimedia container file that contains one or more tracks, each of which stores a particular type of data: audio, video, effects, or text (e.g. for subtitles). Each track either contains a digitally-encoded media stream (using a specific codec) or a data reference to the media stream located in another file. Tracks are maintained in a hierarchal data structure consisting of objects called atoms. An atom can be a parent to other atoms or it can contain media or edit data, but it cannot do both.