QuickTime 3.0 Preview

Today, Apple released a much-awaited developer preview of QuickTime 3.0, also known as the QuickTime Media Layer. QuickTime is one of Apple’s most successful technologies, and Apple hopes to extend its reach by making QuickTime 3.0 fully cross-platform. Currently, Windows users can play back QuickTime media, but with QuickTime 3.0, both Windows and Mac developers will have full access to all of QuickTime’s capabilities – playback, authoring, capture, compression, and more. Along with the many formats already supported, QuickTime 3.0 adds support for a variety of cross-platform video, image, audio, and compression formats, new high-end audio and video formats (plus the forthcoming DV digital video format), and includes new features for fast-downloading vector graphics and real-time effects and transitions. The Macintosh preview requires a Mac with System 7.0 or later, at least 8 MB of RAM, and a 68020 processor or better (some features only available for PowerPC-based machines); the release includes Sound Manager 3.3, MoviePlayer 3.0, QuickTime VR 2.1, and version 2.0 of the QuickTime Web browser plug-in. The download is about 3.7 MB.