Movie Formats

Movie Files | Movie Formats

Movie Formats

QuickTime and MPEG are two of the most common cross platform movie formats currently in use. Of these, QuickTime is perhaps more popular for Windows and Macintosh because of the wide availability of its plugins for browsers on these systems, and because of its ability to synchonize multiple media streams. Players for QuickTime multimedia are freely available for the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95/NT from http://quicktime.apple.com/.
Actually, QuickTime is not really a movie format, but is a software development package that allows the synchronization of video, text, sound, and music. But the name "QuickTime" has come to be popularly applied to movies files that are produced using this package. Such files generally have either a .MOV or .QT extension. (Note that while the Quicktime players are free, the developer's package is a commercial product from Apple.)
QuickTime VR is a recent addition to the QuickTime technology. QTVR is designed to provide a sense of virtual reality by giving a user a 360-degree view, allowing him to move through scenes and around objects.
Many movies that originate on Windows systems are instead in AVI format (and have an .AVI extension). This is the format of movies created by Microsoft's Video for Windows; Windows 95 users can view these movies with Media Player that is included with their systems. AVI does not use a single common timeline for playing images and sounds so these movies may sometimes exhibit some audio/video synchronization problems.
As was the case with sound, browsers themselves do not play movies that they receive from a server. Instead, they can be configured either to save a movie to a disk file, to pass the movie to a "helper" program that can play the movie, or to use a special plugin to play the particular format. For the Macintosh, the freeware program Sparkle can be used to play both MPEG and QuickTime movies, and can also be used to convert between the two formats. The newer versions of QuickTime will do the same. For Windows, the QuickTime plugin can be used to play QuickTime and QTVR (the plugin requires that QuickTime for Windows also be installed).


			Movie Files \| Movie Formats
		Movie Formats QuickTime and MPEG are two of the most common cross platform movie formats currently in use. Of these, QuickTime is perhaps more popular for Windows and Macintosh because of the wide availability of its plugins for browsers on these systems, and because of its ability to synchonize multiple media streams. Players for QuickTime multimedia are freely available for the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95/NT from http://quicktime.apple.com/. Actually, QuickTime is not really a movie format, but is a software development package that allows the synchronization of video, text, sound, and music. But the name "QuickTime" has come to be popularly applied to movies files that are produced using this package. Such files generally have either a `.MOV` or `.QT` extension. (Note that while the Quicktime players are free, the developer's package is a commercial product from Apple.) QuickTime VR is a recent addition to the QuickTime technology. QTVR is designed to provide a sense of virtual reality by giving a user a 360-degree view, allowing him to move through scenes and around objects. Many movies that originate on Windows systems are instead in AVI format (and have an `.AVI` extension). This is the format of movies created by Microsoft's `Video` `for` `Windows`; Windows 95 users can view these movies with Media Player that is included with their systems. `AVI` does not use a single common timeline for playing images and sounds so these movies may sometimes exhibit some audio/video synchronization problems. As was the case with sound, browsers themselves do not play movies that they receive from a server. Instead, they can be configured either to save a movie to a disk file, to pass the movie to a "helper" program that can play the movie, or to use a special plugin to play the particular format. For the Macintosh, the freeware program `Sparkle` can be used to play both MPEG and QuickTime movies, and can also be used to convert between the two formats. The newer versions of QuickTime will do the same. For Windows, the QuickTime plugin can be used to play QuickTime and QTVR (the plugin requires that `QuickTime` `for` `Windows` also be installed).