34 years ago, Apple created a multimedia file format for the Mac, and it’s still all around us

The late 1980s and early to mid-1990s were Apple’s weirdest and wildest era. Wedged between the triumph of the original Macintosh and the return of Steve Jobs were a sort of Wilderness Years where the company flailed all over the place, ultimately flaming out and requiring the now-famous rescue by its co-founder.

To be sure, 1990s Apple was a company with a load of problems, from out-of-control research labs building unsellable products to fruitless quests for software stacks that would reinvent documents and replace Mac OS itself. But that era of calamity and excess was also the source of some real gems, including the product that debuted 34 years ago, on Dec. 2, 1991: QuickTime.

Prehistory of multimedia

If you’re under the age of 40, you probably don’t remember the pre-multimedia era. Computers used to be really, really bad at audio and video. I once spent half an hour downloading a file to a floppy disk so I could play the first ten seconds of “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin through the telephone handset attached to the modem in my Apple II. It was far cry from MP3s.

By the late ’80s and early ’90s, digital audio had been thoroughly integrated into Macs. (PCs needed add-on cards to do much more than issue beeps.) The next frontier was video, and even better, synchronized video and audio. There were a whole lot of challenges: the Macs of the day were not really powerful to decode and display more than a few frames per second, which was more of a slideshow than a proper video. Also, the software written to decode and encode such video (called codecs) was complex and expensive, and there were lots of different formats, making file exchange unreliable.

Apple’s solution wasn’t to invent entirely new software to cover every contingency, but to build a framework for multimedia creation and playback that could use different codecs as needed. At its heart was a file that was a container for other streams of audio and video in various formats: the QuickTime Movie, or MOV.

The early days were a bit of a mess, but I can tell you that I can still remember where I was when I first played a QuickTime movie (in a basement on the UC Berkeley campus, in front of a very fast Mac). The first time I plugged live video into a capture card, and it appeared, digitized, on my Mac’s screen was similarly revelatory.

Keep in mind, this was unbelievably rudimentary even by the standards of the time. When Apple introduced QuickTime 2.0, it supported video at 320 by 240 pixels at 30 frames per second. That is to say, full-motion video at half the quality of the standard-definition video found on television at the time. There was a lot of work still to be done.

The CD-ROM era

QuickTime couldn’t have come along at a better time. Its arrival coincided with the roll-out of CD-ROM drives in Macs and PCs, which let developers fill discs with enormous video and audio files that would’ve flooded the average hard drive of the era. QuickTime (which was available for Mac and Windows alike) became a major mover in the CD-ROM world, providing accompanying video and audio for talking encyclopedias, movie databases, and games.

Over the years, Apple added interactive layers to QuickTime, since so much of the CD-ROM content field demanded it. And in a great burst of creativity, Apple introduced QuickTime VR, a development kit that let you build 360-degree environments from stitched-together photos. The most beloved QuickTime VR CD-ROM was probably the Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual CD-ROM, which provided multiple 360-degree panoramas of various parts of the Enterprise. Today, you can set your iPhone’s camera app to Panorama mode to capture similar vistas–back then, it took dozens of photos and a Power Mac powerful enough to slowly merge them all together.

Since the first days of desktop publishing, the Mac has always been a leader in the media world. QuickTime allowed Apple to push into the video side of things, most notably with the purchase of Final Cut Pro in 1998. The company even held its own QuickTime Live conference event, catering to the video industry.

The rise of the internet

The rise of the internet changed the game for QuickTime, of course. CD-ROMs offered relatively limited storage, but pretty decent bandwidth. You could store infinite amounts of video on the internet and add new videos all the time, but it had to come through a very, very slow data pipe in those early days.

Apple built its own streaming software (the QuickTime Streaming Server) to provide different video qualities for different bandwidths, but a lot of the light and heat in the early days of internet multimedia streaming went elsewhere, to companies like RealNetworks, the makers of RealAudio. Apple did turn QuickTime into its own sort of multimedia browser, letting you click to various sites that offered videos in QuickTime format, including a very popular movie trailers library that survived for many years.

512 Pixels

Still, QuickTime remained a staple video tool for Mac users. Macs came with QuickTime Player, but you could pay to upgrade (!) to access QuickTime Pro, which let you slice and dice movie files, adding and removing audio and video tracks. For an app that purported to be a simple player utility, QuickTime Pro was actually incredibly useful on its own. Sadly, it was discontinued when Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps with macOS Catalina. The current QuickTime Player X app that ships on every Mac uses a different set of frameworks and doesn’t support many of the codecs that had been supported by “classic” QuickTime. In many ways, the release of macOS Catalina marked the end of the road for QuickTime.

Except… QuickTime’s legacy lives on. At a recent event I attended at Apple Park, Apple’s experts in immersive video for the Vision Pro pointed out that the standard format for immersive videos is, at its heart, a QuickTime container.

And perhaps the most ubiquitous video container format on the internet, the MP4 file? That standard file format is actually a container format that can encompass different kinds of audio, video, and other information, all in one place. If that sounds familiar, that’s because MPEG-4 is based on the QuickTime format.

Thirty-four years later, QuickTime may seem like a quaint product of a long-lost era of Apple. But the truth is, it’s become an integral part of the computing world, so pervasive that it’s almost invisible. I’d like to forget most of what happened at Apple in the early 1990s, but QuickTime definitely deserves our appreciation.