Chapter 20: QuickTime and the iLife Suite

Overview

The beginnings of QuickTime were understandably humble, with the first version focusing mainly on providing the ability to watch small, jumpy videos in a “player” window on your Mac.

Twelve years later QuickTime is now the foundation of the amazing multimedia capabilities of Mac OS X and a widely used cross-platform Internet file format standard. Thanks to QuickTime, you can use your Mac as an audio jukebox with the iTunes application, buy music online with the iTunes Music Store, and take it with you in your iPod. You can store and work with the images from your digital camera with iPhoto. You can take raw digital videos from your camcorder and convert them into edited, polished home movies with iMovie. And you can take photos from iPhoto and movies from iMovie and save them on an impressive, slick-looking DVD, with the iDVD application (and an Apple SuperDrive).

These four applications, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and iDVD, are part of what Apple markets as the iLife suite. They are at the center of the digital hub, Steve Jobs’ concept of the Macintosh facilitating work with handheld digital devices; and QuickTime is its core.

QuickTime also gives you the ability to watch video DVDs on your Macintosh, or play video files over the Internet (even on a Windows PC), or view video streamed from a QuickTime Streaming Server. You can even view or create virtual reality files with QuickTime VR.

In this Chapter, you find out about QuickTime technology, and how it works in Panther. We also give you a concise overview of the four iLife applications — an in-depth how-to for them is beyond the scope of this book.