Apple today announced a preview edition of QuickTime 6 is now available from the company’s Web site. QuickTime 6 is the industry’s first mainstream MPEG-4 solution for streaming media to all MPEG-4 compliant players.
“QuickTime 6 delivers the world’s first complete media solution for creating, streaming and viewing MPEG-4 content,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “MPEG-4 is an open standard being adopted by wireless, computer and entertainment companies around the world because it delivers the highest quality digital video, and allows content creators to scale the quality/bandwidth tradeoff all the way from MPEG-2 quality to dramatically lower bandwidths for streaming over the Internet.”
QuickTime 6 includes the new Instant-On Streaming feature that eliminates buffer delays and provides users with the ability to quickly and easily scrub through streaming media content to locate and instantly view specific sections. QuickTime 6 running on Mac OS X also supports JPEG 2000, the next generation JPEG standard that allows users to capture still images in a higher quality and smaller file size than they could before.
QuickTime 6 also includes Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), the standard MPEG-4 audio format. AAC is the next-generation professional-quality audio format that delivers vastly superior sound quality at drastically reduced file sizes — better than MP3 and better than Windows Media Player (WMA), according to Apple.
Additional features of QuickTime 6 include:
Key features of QuickTime Broadcaster include: