QuickTime is the media player from Apple Inc. which plays a variety of different formats of digital video, pictures and audio. QuickTime has moved on from being a simple video clip player to include more advanced features such us the ability to create HD videos, convert media into other formats and watch streamed videos via the player or browser. QuickTime is available for both Mac and Windows.

Apple released QuickTime in 1991 and it was a technological breakthrough at the time, delivering a program that could play videos on a personal computer. QuickTime 1.0 was originally released with just three codecs; they were suited to live action video, cartoon-type graphics and 8-bit images. Later on in 1992 QuickTime was contracted to allow for compatibility with the Windows OS but with limited features. QuickTime 2.0 was released in 1994 and was the only version during its history to not be freeware; it included support to play music tracks and with the later release of 2.1 Apple made the software free again. QuickTime 4.0 available for Mac and Windows was the first to support streaming videos from the web and mp3 playback. QuickTime 6.0 supported MPEG-4 playback and iTunes.

QuickTime 7.0 included the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC codec which supported HD videos, Core Audio for high resolution sound and updated the UI.
QuickTime 1