Category: Software » MultiMedia → Quicktime player

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.