But it included Apple's "crown jewels", the QuickTime player source code, and they were't going to give that away in 1995. Apple were even trepidatious about IBM having access to that source code.
Besides having proprietary decoders, it could also do some things you can't even do well with the Flash player or html video component today: like smoothly playing videos and music backwards!
Ever since the music industry switched from vinyl to CD, listening to demonic backmasking in Devil Music like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin's promotion of Satanism became much less convenient. ScriptX solved that important problem elegantly with its synchronized clock system, but today's HTML video player still hasn't, alas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backmasking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BDh_j5qAJ4
Here's a description of ScriptX's clock system:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18350511
>Kaleida Lab's ScriptX (a multimedia programing language kinda like Dylan with classes) had built-in support for hierarchal clocks within the container (in the sense of "window" not "vm") hierarchy. The same way every window or node has a 2D or 3D transformation matrix, each clock has a time scale and offset relative to its parent, so anything that consumes time (like a QuickTime player, or a simulation) runs at the scaled and offset time that it inherits from through its parent containers. And you can move and scale each container around in time as necessary, to pause movies or simulations.) You could even set the scale to a negative number, and it played QuickTime movies backwards! (That was pretty cool in 1995 -- try playing a movie backwards in the web browser today!)
Is it possible to play HTML5 video in reverse?
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5277293/is-it-possible-t...
Kinda, but it's not smooth enough to sing along while dancing backwards and worshiping Satan to: