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Comment by NTripleOne | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm happy to forget anything that has quicktime in the name...

All I remember is the spammy nag screens every time it was updated: "Why not buy Quicktime Pro?" and Apple's hideous brushed steel UI which often didn't quiet render correctly.

Why? QuickTime is one of the best media stacks out there.

Is that true? I've always associated Quicktime with lag and bugs. Also, one of the rare instances of non-driver software causing BSODs, which is quite a mean feat.

On Windows it's always been terrible. The Mac frameworks are pretty solid.

Guessing you never directly programmed such frameworks. Back in the day, writing multimedia for Windows was a nightmare... especially if you wanted to do things like play multiple videos in sync with a common master clock. QuickTime was the only way to do it reasonably.

Nope, I thankfully never had to do this for Windows, but I can imagine your pain!

I can't even remember ever being able to seek in a Windows Media file without breaking the entire playback. Never had any problems like that with QuickTime.

>I can't even remember ever being able to seek in a Windows Media file without breaking the entire playback.

What's that got to do with Quicktime?

I believe he is implying that Quicktime was the only app/codec/container that allowed the user to stop, rewind, fast forward, jump around in the clip without the app completely failing. As a video editor for the past 26 years, that has been my experience. Every other video playback app/container that I've used (on both Windows and Mac) failed at treating a clip in a non-linear manner. My current preference is still for Quicktime 7, the utility knife for video playback (even more so than VLC in my experience).

No, QuickTime only has problems opening, exporting, crashing and doing other things -

https://www.google.com/search?q=quicktime+crash+error+site%3...

On PC I've always associated it with not being able to full screen a video and bad play/pause/rewind/FF controls.

The player was crappy, but the actual framework was great. I believe the file format formed the basis of MPEG4.

Looks like it was. https://developer.apple.com/standards/classicquicktime.html

Quicktime still is the standard in professional video. Everybody uses QuickTime and Apple prores codecs.

As many, from the average 90s Windows user, QT was just an awkward penguin plugin. It "felt" outdated even in these days.

For programmers or for users?

As a user - the QuickTime UX sucked like most other Apple software and I'm glad that nobody uses it anymore for things that I need to look at.

isn't the MPEG4 container based on the Quicktime container?

Pretty much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_14

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