The death of QuickTime as we know it

[David Lawrence]

[Oliver Peters] “With Mavericks, QTX player only supports H264 and ProRes. Other codecs in MOV containers are converted to these two codecs. Presumably this also includes uncompressed media, which FCP X can still export. Manufacturers are currently getting around this by recommending the continued use of QT7. What happens when Apple no longer supports or distributes QT7? Or when it quits working completely in another OS version or two?”

I just got a new Retina MacBook Pro and noticed this too. One of the first things I had to do was download the QT7 player to open files without them converting. QT& player is also an essential tool for file conversion since QTX’s file export options are severely limited.

I’ve never liked QTX to be honest. Just too limited for my needs. If QT7 player gets phased out, I’m not sure what I’d do but I’d be in trouble. I guess this is an opportunity for a third party…

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David Lawrence
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[Oliver Peters]

As I understand it, if your have FCP X installed, then additional codecs (AVC-Intra, uncompressed, XDCAM, DVCPRO HD) are supported. At least for now. Others, like Avid DNxHD are not. Therefore, you have to install QT7. I presume Apple is migrating some of this support to AVF, so it’s only a matter of time before QT32-based formats simply won’t work.

Pretty scary, since a lot of companies are migrating to ProRes deliverables as a de facto standard. Master to uncompressed MOV or DNxHD or JPEG2000 and you just might be in trouble later. The trouble is the QT container format, since it adheres to no actual open standard. DNxHD or JPEG2000 in an MXF wrapper might be safer, but that’s also unknown.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[John Davidson]

Here’s a list of every code thats out.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/335/61363#61363

We had a pretty good thread about it in the aftereffects forum as well I think l.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Chris Harlan]

John, I’d very much like to see that, but your link links back to this thread instead of wherever you intended taking us.

[John Davidson]

Derp. That’s what I get for posting w/ an iPad.

Here’s the After Effects forum:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1043821#1043821

And the OS X forum post:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/71/863688

Jpeg codec still works, as does AVCHD. You can tell just by what plays back when you hit spacebar. Otherwise QTX will creat a converted copy to either an H264 codec or ProRes. Currently there’s a little quirk with converting 720p PNG/Alpha channel based QT’s. Instead of converting to ProRes 4444 it converts to H264, thus losing the alpha channel.

For heavily used qt’s, you might want to consider doing a batch convert via Compressor to ProRes4444. We did/are doing that now. In fact, we’re doing an entire media overhaul and rebuilding our folder organization, so this kind of fits into that overarching plan.

[Jeremy Garchow]

My guess is that third party players will take this over.

VLC can already handle a lot of things simply unavailable to the OS.

MXF Player is another. https://www.hamburgpromedia.com/products/mxf4mac/applications/mxf-for-mac-player.php

My guess is that there’ll be others, hopefully they’ll be able to assist Quicklook but I’m not holding out hope for that.

Apple is not one to drag legacy tech very far.

[Oliver Peters]

[Jeremy Garchow] “My guess is that third party players will take this over. “

These only work when the specific codec wrapped in MOV is supported by QT itself. These players use QT under-the-hood to do their thing. They do not do this on their own. For example, MPEG Streamclip only works with QT MPEG2 if you’ve bought and installed that component from Apple. My concern is whether this support will continue to exist. There is no way for third party developers to do this outside of Apple, since QT is proprietary and not open source. This will become more of an issue with clients who often have the bare minimum installed.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Andrew Richards]

[Oliver Peters] “I presume Apple is migrating some of this support to AVF, so it’s only a matter of time before QT32-based formats simply won’t work.”

Mavericks is the first release of OS X where Apple has a complete media handling stack to replace QuickTime, albeit with a much more limited scope of format support compared to what QuickTime had. The best technical overview you can get for this is session 606 from WWDC13 called “Moving to AVKit and AVFoundation” (you’ll need to find the video listing on the linked page and login with a free Apple Developer account, as there is no apparent way to directly link to it).

The presentation gives a nice technical history of QuickTime before getting into what they are replacing it with and how they are handling that.

[Oliver Peters] “Pretty scary, since a lot of companies are migrating to ProRes deliverables as a de facto standard. Master to uncompressed MOV or DNxHD or JPEG2000 and you just might be in trouble later. The trouble is the QT container format, since it adheres to no actual open standard. DNxHD or JPEG2000 in an MXF wrapper might be safer, but that’s also unknown.”

I think the only truly future-poof method of holding masters to assume the format you are holding is not future-proof and maintaining an infrastructure capable of converting it to whatever comes next.

Best,
Andy

[Andrew Richards]

[David Lawrence] “I’ve never liked QTX to be honest. Just too limited for my needs. If QT7 player gets phased out, I’m not sure what I’d do but I’d be in trouble. I guess this is an opportunity for a third party…”

Have you tried Digital Heaven’s Pro Player? I haven’t, but it claims to pick up the flag for the old QuickTime Pro, and for the same stand-alone price that Apple used to charge back in the day. Oliver endorsed it!

Best,
Andy

[Michael Phillips]

I do like Pro Player a lot, but there is something to be said in workflow with the Quicklook feature. I was also on another thread where the customer did not want to install anything other than their beloved OSX player because it’s what they had. Stupid I know, but causes issues all the same. Both QuickTime and ProRes codec are not open formats. That is why DNxHD (DPX, etc.) was ratified by SMPTE as VC3 ensuring archives of material could still be decoded by anyone using the specification. One could say the same for R3D which is only available through the company or by licensing. I think Cineform was going through some SMPTE ratification before being acquired by GoPro but I need to check into that again.

Bringing the “goodness and ease”of iOS7 to OS X is a consumer play, not necessarily a good one for the content creators themselves. On one hand, I’m all for getting out of QuickTime’s quirky gamma of the day issues regardless of codec, and hope that “quickly” over time, that the new AV Foundation allows for other codecs to be accessed. And if they want to play really nicely with broadcasters and studio archives, publish AV Foundation as an open format.

Michael