To those who often use the QuickTime video player software, whether in a Mac or Windows PC, the file extension .MOV should be quite familiar. It’s a file format extension developed by Apple as its multimedia format of choice for its QuickTime environment. QuickTime is widely used in iTunes and is the default file format for the QuickTime player application as well as the emerging Safari platform for mobile devices. The format is quite popular in many websites for audio or video streaming. Thanks to the QuickTime multimedia player software that many have downloaded from the net as a freeware, the format has achieved universal reach and acceptance in Windows multimedia applications.

QuickTime’s MOV file is not a codec (code/decode) format like MPEG4 but is a container video file format. As the term suggests, a MOV file can contain a number of both video codec file formats like H-263,H-264/AVC, WMV, and MPEG4, to mention the more often used video codecs, and audio codecs like Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, WMA, AC3, DTS and AMR, to mention some. Unlike other popular container file formats like AVI, 3GP, the MOV container format supports the most number of video and audio codecs through its internal codec and sound manager core engines that the others don’t have.

A short history of the format

In was in December of 1991 when Apple released the first commercial QuickTime platform and its associated MOV file format for the Mac system 6 operating system. MAC users were enthralled to see the famous 1984 apple TV ad played on the MAC workstation – the first for any desktop computer. (It’s interesting to note that Windows would not be releasing its video for Windows platform until a year later, in November 1992.)

Succeeding versions improved on the MOV files and about the same time that Video for Windows was launched in 1992, it contained the Cinepak vector quantizing video codec called Compact Video for its version 1.5 that swiftly endeared itself among Mac users for being the first video on the desktop to run 30 frames per second at a resolution of 320 x 240. Thereafter, Apple released QuickTime version 1.6 for Windows in the last quarter of 1993 to give Windows PC users a better alternative to the Windows native video application.

These days, QuickTime is now on its 7^th version with 7.1.06 supporting Windows XP and 7.2 destined as the first version for the Windows Vista. The version 7 family now has the Core Audio and the core Video that allows high resolution H.264/AVC and Mpeg4 video codec to be played

Audio and Video support

The MOV file container format can contain the following audio, video and graphics files and codecs.

Audio

• Apple Lossless
• AIFF or Audio Interchange File Format
• CDDA or 16-bit CD audio
• MIDI
• MP3 or MPEG-1 Layer 3 Audio
• MPEG-4 AAC Audio (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p)
• QCELP or Qualcomm PureVoice
• AU Audio from SUN
• ULAW and ALAW Audio
• WAV or Waveform Audio

Video

• 3GPP & 3GPP2 file formats
• AVI file format
• BMP or Bitmap codec and file format
• DV file (DV NTSC/PAL and DVC Pro NTSC/PAL codecs)
• Flash & FlashPix files
• Animated GIF files
• H.261, H.263 and H.264 codecs
• JPEG, Photo JPEG, and JPEG-2000 codecs and file formats
• MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4/AVC codecs and file formats
• QTZ or Quartz Composer Composition for Mac OS X only
• Other video codecs: Apple Video, Cinepak, Component Video, Graphics, and Planar RGB
• Other still image formats: PNG, TIFF, and TGA

Benefits of MOV file container

The MOV file under QuickTime lends itself better to editing the video file than its competing media containers from Windows. In 1998, ISO (International Standards Organization) approved the MOV file format to form the basis of the MPEG-4 Part 14 (.mp4) file container standard so that by 2000, MPEG-4 Part 14 has became an industry standard, first appearing in 2002 with QuickTime version 6. As such, the MPEG-4 container can capture and edit, unlike in earlier MPEG iterations.

MP4 is the default file container format for MPEG4, and both MOV and MP4 containers can use the Mpeg4 video codec as they are interchangeable in the QuickTime environment. But it should be noted that MP4 has better international hardware support among DVD players, mobile devices and game consoles such as the Sony PSP. On the Software side, most video platforms like Video for Windows and Direct Show do contain better codec support like parsers for the MP4 format than for MOV.

On the otherhand, when using the QuickTime platform, MOV files can now support multichannel audio while MP4 files can only be played in stereo.

QuickTime is integral to the MAC operating platform and is optional in the Windows platform. But increasingly more Windows applications are using QuickTime when displaying audio and video information. Many PC encyclopedic software applications use QuickTime and its default MOV file support when playing multimedia files.