Hassling with it on Windows was always a big pain, with the versions being incompatible to one another. Also it left so much bloat and changed so many settings it looked like malware. But to be fair most of those crude media applications did that at this time. (Looking at you, Realplayer!)
Also you needed the browser (Internet Explorer) plugin, because HTML5 video wasn't a thing, but everyone wanted to display their media.
In a sidenote QuickTime also was part of other installers, too. One big CAD application needed QT on the system for displaying their help files (and I guess some media im-/export). It wouldn't even install without it. To make things worse, the installer itself – not the app, mind you – was in Java. To uninstall now you both need an old Java and an old QuickTime to be installed first...
I distinctly remember the QuickTime uninstaller had a checkmark option for “full uninstall” or similar that nuked my sound driver on Windows XP. Probably caused some missing DLL for the Sound Blaster card. The only way my high school self could fix it was full OS reinstall!
Having to install QuickTime on Windows was far from a pleasant experience. If I remember correctly, it came with its own non-native UI and a massive pile of bloat you never used. It was incredibly slow.
Before it (thankfully) disappeared altogether, we used the tiny and much faster "QuickTime alternative" player, to avoid needing to install the original.
I never understood why major OS developers never saw codecs as their responsibility. Instead, the native video player for each platform supports a very limited number of codecs, and sometimes isn’t even extendible with more codecs. You shouldn’t need a VLC. This has been the case since the beginning of the internet.
In many cases it was patent issues -- putting the codecs in the OS could significantly increase it's cost.
I'm at least 15 years out of date, so this may be a much less serious issue nowadays (although also codec issues seem less serious, windows will just open most formats I try).
>, how do ffmpeg and vlc go around that problem then?
The ffmpeg project does not distribute binaries with unlicensed or illegal code. E.g. if you want ffmpeg to use libdvdcss for decrypting DVDs or use libfdk-aac to encode aac/m4a without paying license royalties to Fraunhofer, the end user has to download those components and build a custom ffmpeg on their own. No legitimate website will host ffmpeg built with the "illegal/unlicensed" libraries. E.g. When the popular Zeranoe website hosted ffmpeg executables for download, it was only built with the free GNU components.
Because there is no money in suing either projects. If a large company such as Apple ships all these codecs, patent holders will flock to try a quick cash grab. These litigations are time and money consuming.
You can buy certain codes from the Windows Store to play them in Windows. On some devices the manufacturer already paid for them and you can download them for free.
I don't think many people will pay $0.80 for a HEVC codec just to play the video they just recorded on their phone. There used to be so many codecs out there in use that you'd probably need to raise the price of the OS by between $5 and $10 if you wanted decent codec support.
You'd also be stuck paying for those codecs, or convince customers to pay the codecs on demand later, giving their "free upgrade" a price, even if it's a small price to pay.
VLC and other players exist because the jurisdictions they are made in or are hosted in aren't as strict as, for example, the American patent system, which is silly enough to actually allow patents on algorithms. Microsoft could never distribute a free player with Windows in many markets without paying for those patents. If you use or resell ffmpeg to places that enforce software patents, you actually need to check if you've paid off your patent bribe or you're opening yourself to potential lawsuits.
I got a copy of the QTVR Authoring Studio sw in mid 90’ and me (and 1-2 colleagues) created a full multinode qtvr demo of the place I worked at then - I think this was the most impressive task I have ever done (I was really young and in-experienced then…)
- Some people thought it was ‘video’! qtvr was that impressive at that time…
I just restored a DAT backup tape last month with the result (it was labeled ‘chicken backup 1996…’) and had to find an old Mac in order to watch it…!
Back when the first digital cameras were coming out in the mid-90s (the type that saved to 3.5" floppy disks), a friend of mine and I were playing with QTVR. We had this brilliant idea of making websites for real estate listings to offer virtual tours. Turns out, in the mid-90s and its state of online capabilities, we were 15 years to soon. Nobody, and I mean not-one-damn-person that we showed our demo to understood where it could go.
Hap video frames are stored in a MOV container, but you could use .MKV too. What exactly do you need from Quicktime ? I work with the Hap codec too, so Im interested :)
After Effects still does not support exporting to the MKV container and so it doesn't fit into my typical rendering workflow. Hence I've stuck with MOV using HAP-alpha.
As a experiment, I rendered out a PNG frame sequence (with alpha) and then used FFMPEG to render out both an MOV and MKV using the hap_alpha codec.
--- When I tried importing both videos into Resolume then the MOV was successful but the MKV was rejected. Doesn't seem to be a supported.
--- VLC could not playback the MKV.
--- MPC-HC successfully played back the MKV and reported it was an rgba video.
So it was interesting experiment, but not something that my necessary software pipeline supports.
On a related note, MacOS QuickTime Player has the ability to record the screen, or sections of it, and it is super easy to use. I wish MS would build a similarly easy-to-use tool into Windows.
Is there a Win utility that is as easy? I’ve tried 3-4 but have struggle to make short recordings of portions of the screen without a struggle.
You can bypass the app! Hit Cmd-Shift-5 to get the exact same interface from anywhere on MacOS. Makes it much easier to record things while on a separate space, for instance.
For recording a single application or the full screen, you can use the Xbox game bar which is built into Windows.
I don't know about recording part of your screen, though, I haven't tried it so I don't know if it's possible with the built in functionality. I'd probably go for OBS but that's far from easy to work with.
I very rarely use Windows, but when I wanted to do a screen recording I heard about the X-Box gamebar thing. IIRC, it required a version of Windows other than the base license level and you had to sign into a Microsoft account just to use it.
Instead, I opened up a Windows VM in Parallels on my MBA and did a quick screen recording with Quicktime. No Microsoft (or other) logins needed.
No, the game bar is in any version of Windows since the Creators Update (I believe?). It should be available in either home or pro, and you shouldn't even need a working license key to use it. You also don't need to sign into anything to use the recording functionality. Microsoft REALLY wants you to, but it's not a necessity.
Its settings are in the Xbox app somewhere, but you don't need to sign in for that part: you can simply close the popup, or accept the defaults (like storing the videos in your user folder instead of somewhere else).
To use it, hit Win+G to open up the game bar and hit the record button. Alternatively, you can start/stop recording immediately with Win+alt+R.
The various releases of Windows 10 aren't different licenses, they're similar to Apple's OS X releases: iterative improvements within the same code base, with new features and such.
Oddly enough I just used QuickTime to edit some audio files, it has a built in "trim" tool that is quite nice. First time I ever really used it, it was a pleasant experience.
It is impressive how Apple ProRes has become the standard intermediate video format for creators. It absolutely dominates the industry as the most popular way to exchange high quality compressed footage during post production.
Can ProRes be decoded at full bit depth on Windows now? The original decoder for Win would only decode at 8bit, and that was after Apple finally relented to offering a decoder for Windows at all.
I remember clicking around that application as a kid trying to figure out what was good about it. I never figured it out. Seeing the splash because it decided it was the default application for some random format was always annoying. But back then you kind of kept everything around just in case - sometimes nothing could play a file except for real player so you’d begrudgingly let it play it for you.
The only time I used to use real player was to download music from official CDs, the ones you couldn't just copy and paste. Otherwise the whole software looked and felt like malware
Not silently at all. HackerNews alone has 165 discussions with WinAmp in the title, and some 2500 comments mentioning WinAmp. There are revival projects, a JS port, archive.org themselves use WinAmpJs to let you listen to their content, and so on. WinAmp has quite a legacy.
VLC still supports some RealPlayer files. I have a few hundred rips of 1920s vinyl in RP format that I can still play that way, but I'm not sure if all codecs would be supported.
Quicktime is the basis of the MP4 file format, so it's still in use pretty much everywhere.
>MPEG-4 Part 14 is an instance of the more general ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004 (MPEG-4 Part 12: ISO base media file format) which is directly based upon the QuickTime File Format which was published in 2001.
I feel saddened by the pseudo halo Apple software gets to be associated with for no valid reason. While it’s the opposite. Apple software is utterly mediocre and more or less it has been so.
What Apple has managed to do is a disgustingly closed ecosystem and a genius racket of a marketing and has built an aura around itself. It’s so obscene that when it brings a feature on its phone that was available on Android for years, and was released on Android without any fanfare - merely as an essential feature, Apple pushes it, and the media, bloggers, and many users lap it up, as if Apple just figured out perpetual energy.
I seriously doubt the scene will be any different if Apple tomorrow announces a mechanical trolley for $9989 and says it runs on Apple exclusive TrueWheel™.
It feels such journalists and bloggers live in a different universe and no I’m not even talking about Apple shills (some of them have become “critic” of late; jg et al), I am talking about the ones who are probably not shills.
> QuickTime was bigger than Apple itself, so widely known that many who used it on their PCs weren’t even aware that it was an Apple product
Some memories, thoughts on Quicktime. Yes, I had heard it came out of ATG (Apple's Advanced Technology Group). Lots of cool things came out of ATG when it was still around. Initially though Quicktime could barely play wallet-size video but we still thought it was kind of cool.
Peter Hoddie. Now that is a name I haven't heard in a long time. Some of the more ... eccentric engineers I met worked on the Quicktime team, ha ha.
Some of us were of the opinion at the time that one of Quicktime's failings was the lack of codecs that shipped with the OS (Mac's System 7, 8, 9). Mention this around engineers on the QT team and the response was something like, "Codecs are for 3rd parties, Apple is not in the Codec business." Too bad.
There was, perhaps undeserved, a sense that the Quicktime team were a bit haughty, maybe thought they were bigger than Apple. I say this regarding the time when Apple was circling the drain, so they may well have been correct.
But I think Jobs return to Apple must have been another nail in the coffin for Quicktime. NeXT was still his baby and you suspect that Quicktime's not-invented-here status (and, quixotically, "here" in this case means "NeXT") might have meant Jobs had it in for the technology.
Aside: Did Jobs shut down ATG? (I know he shut down Apple's technical library. Given, as I say, Apple circling the drain at the time, shutting down ATG might have seemed an act of financial prudence.)
The NeXt app, Preview, was handed to me when Mac OS X was just getting going: Preview being wholly built upon the image offerings of AppKit (NSImage). Someone though had grafted a bit of Quicktime code that would add a handful of additional image types that AppKit did not support so Preview could also open BMP files, maybe Targa files, etc. It was just a sort of "image pre-processing" though to get the pixels from Quicktime — go straight to NSImage at that point. It looked to me that Quicktime was not going to be a First-Class Citizen in this new Mac OS X.
Quicktime stuck around for quite a while longer though. I vaguely recall that the QT team had the cross-platform code that iTunes would need in order to serve iPod playlists for owners of Windows PC's. Basically Quicktime had something like the old Mac Toolbox (yes, Quickdraw included) that also ran under Windows.
I came to like OS X though. It showed its UNIX pedigree by leaning more on open libraries like JPEGLib, TiffLib, PNGLib and other industry image frameworks. For a while there Apple was not trying to set the tone with proprietary formats (and just now FireWire comes to mind), but rather happy to follow where the "industry" was going. It seems only when Apple had regained a healthy market share again (about a decade later?) would it begin to resume introducing new standards and, in that regard, be more of a leader.
We had so much fun making teapots you could spin in QuicktimeVR when I was in junior high. I was still using it for putting out quick architectural design walkarounds until a couple years ago, when it became basically impossible for most people to run a version of Quicktime Player old enough to support it. After that I hacked together my own pipeline with ThreeJS/WebVR to turn panoramas into point to point walkarounds, and sent clients Oculus Go's as Christmas presents so they could view them through the browser.
[Edit] Also, I just found a review of my favorite tech toy from the early 90s: The VideoSpigot card that let you actually digitize composite video on a home Mac. The quality was absolute shite and the memory and storage at the time were hardly capable of handling it, but it was the first time you could ever do something like that. It came bundled with Premiere!
Please share tips for how to consume qtvr on current sw!
- I am sad that I am not being able to demo this old qtvr work (and recording a video of is my current alternative - it shows the point, but without the interactivity)
I remember how much it sucked on Windows. It’s good on macOS as a standard desktop app these days with solid screen recording. Would be nice if it came with built in computer audio recording though, Soundflower seems to be behind by a few releases & Blackhole murdered my ability to use speakers on Zoom calls until I uninstalled it.
You don’t need to open QuickTime anymore for that, just press cmd shift 5
I love the feature, but it doesn’t record the computer audio like it does on iOS. I hope it comes eventually, I don’t want to deal with bloated third party apps.
I love that QuickTime lets you cut (not just trim) and join videos. It’s a fairly obscure feature that has helped me avoid iMovie for the past few years.
once you have a virtual audio interface installed, you can use the built in audio/midi editor, create an aggregate device, and use that from inside QuickTime.
it's not super straightforward to set up, but once you have it set up, you can route audio anywhere and record that easily with QuickTime.
using an extension for virtual audio, for a system designed for routing audio isn't really a "hack", and I'm kind of surprised that with the audio routing already available in macOS that it doesn't ship with a virtual audio device out of the box.
the worst part is that most Mac owners don't know about "Audio MIDI Setup.app"
Again, I know it’s possible and I’m writing this to express my wish that it wasn’t necessary. Installing kernel extensions and keeping “Soundflower 8ch, Soundflower 16ch” permanently in my audio output lists is a compromise and a hack.
Apple was on the forefront of computer Video. They founded ATG (advanced technology group) in late eighties and as a result came out with Road Apple Video codec (Road Pizza) in 1991.
1 Look up S3TC/DXTC texture compression, S3 copied Apple video codec verbatim and patented it for 3D graphics use. Somehow Apple missed that and didnt fight initial patent, resulting in losing couple iphone court cases 10 years later and purging S3TC from mobile.
That 1998 article is the first I'd seen claiming that the 1997 deal was a repayment, versus a purchase of non-voting shares as described at the time and announced by Jobs and Gates at Macworld. https://www.wired.com/1997/08/apple-takes-150-million-from-m... The register article quotes a note saying there was a significant MS payment for QT specifically, but doesn't actually claim that the 1997 investment wasn't an investment, as far as I can tell.
Saving, of course, was always an exaggeration, as reported in that Wired article from the time too: "For Apple, the cash is symbolic. While the company has been bleeding money, it has about $1.2 billion in cash, according to its last quarterly earnings report, and doesn't need Microsoft's money to fend off immediate starvation." Recommitting to Office was a much bigger thing than the cash, probably,
Also, if you had the misfortune of running the software on Windows, it insisted on trying to look like a mac. In it's meager defense, almost all media players tried to look non-native at the time.
Skinning media players was one of the ways I got into graphic design (and became a software developer as a result). It was a ton of fun as a kid! I wonder if kids these days have anything like it. You sure can’t skin Spotify or Apple Music.
I'm proud to say that Quicktime remains the only Apple product or service I have ever purchased, and I've been using time-sharing computing since before Apple existed, and desktop computers since the TRS-80. Ironically, the original reason I bought it was due to needing, on very short notice, software to play a short video of that old "Get A Mac" ad on TV[1] with actors playing a young Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
> I'm proud to say that Quicktime remains the only Apple product or service I have ever purchased, and I've been using time-sharing computing since before Apple existed, and desktop computers since the TRS-80.
You might consider getting an Apple II. It has color graphics and a lot of good games. You can even add a Z-80 card to it to run CP/M software.
Noticeably absent from this discussion: Microsoft's attempts to kill Quicktime(amongst a range of competitor technologies), and their reasonable success in these pursuit.
Relevant excerpt:
Microsoft Threatens QuickTime Partners
In addition to providing roadblocks to QuickTime running on Windows, Microsoft also worked to stop QuickTime by threatening its partners to abandon licensing, distribution, or development of anything related to QuickTime, or else prepare to face the retribution Microsoft could deliver.
Hardware: Microsoft leaned on its Windows PC OEMs to prevent them from bundling QuickTime; trial testimony revealed specifically how Microsoft took quick steps to block Compaq's licensing of QuickTime.
While Compaq was enthusiastic about licensing QuickTime to help differentiate its PCs from those of rivals, after Microsoft heard about the plans and expressed its disapproval, the company suddenly withdrew and refused to continue any talks with Apple.
Applications: Microsoft also jumped on Avid Cinema, a new consumer video editing product based on QuickTime that long time Apple partner Avid was preparing to release.
Microsoft told Avid engineers, "You need to rip QuickTime out of your product if you want to be in this channel." Months later, Avid announced a partnership with Microsoft on its new AAF format for multimedia authoring.
Drivers: Microsoft also pounced on Truevision, a video capture card vendor. After learning that the company was developing QuickTime drivers for its video capture cards, Microsoft invested in the company with the proviso that the company could not market, brand, or refer to the drivers as a QuickTime driver, and could only bundle them with a specific application, not offer the drivers for sale separately.
Advanced Authoring Format
Microsoft had backed up its threats to jump into the media authoring business to kill QuickTime entirely by developing the Advanced Authoring Format, the last missing component of Microsoft's rival offerings.
In June 1998, Microsoft advised Apple that its only remaining choice in the matter would be to agree to a broad technology sharing plan that donated its technology to Microsoft and abandoned its own competitive efforts:
•Apple had to agree to cross-license its codecs and collaborate with Microsoft on all future codec development
•Apple had to adopt Microsoft's DirectX run-time platform on Windows in place of QuickTime
•Apple had to adopt Microsoft's proprietary streaming technology
•Apple had to adopt Microsoft's new proprietary AAF file format for media authoring
MS really came too early. What they should have done is have an app store, only allow users to receive software via the pipe they control, and disallow anything that challenges them, a la Apple with Firefox or Google with youtube-dl.
Basically, I find the distinction between 'computer' and 'device' (using the common parlance) troublesome. The control that manufacturers have in phones and consoles would be appalling if done in a general computer, but I find the distinction meaningless.
Why can't we let device makers choose that for themselves? While iOS has a streamlined application and approval process for apps, it's still an application and approval process. On the other hand Windows, macOS and similar do not have this requirement to run software on those platforms.
To me that's a meaningful distinction. It seems like there is a desire out there to turn iOS into macOS through government lobbying - I can see both sides to that discussion, but I have various arguments for why this would be a mistake for actual end users, whose experience I hold above developers' wishes for new business opportunities.
The targeting of a popular platform this way is killing the golden goose. Certain greedy types are spearheading initiatives that will harm small developers and the platform for the sole benefit of bigger players.
Consumers don't want to fuss with stores or hand their payment details over to an unknown 3rd party, we've seen it with digital magazine/news/music/content subscriptions, we've seen it with premium SMS, we've seen it with an endless parade of scam apps and services online. We even see it offline with gym memberships, scam-charities and again magazine/newspaper subscriptions. The escrow-model of the AppStore and Google Play lets consumers ignore the trust issues in handing over their banking/CC details. If suddenly the only way you can get non-Apple or non-Google services is to give your bank or credit card details to an unknown, that is going to result in trust problems eventually turning away consumers from online purchasing, plus obvious fraud issues at the credit-card or bank level, and a shift in developers having to rely on ad-supported "free" apps, because consumers are wary of purchasing directly.
"But a developer could just use IAP?!!?11" - sure they could, but now they can't compete with incumbents like Spotify who would have an unfair margin advantage, since they're well known and considered trustworthy. The likes of Spotify are then able to use their better margins to undercut smaller players who would need to use IAP for trust reasons, plus smaller operators will not be able to attain comparable rates with a payment processor. I.E. Start-ups or small operators get screwed by this.
All up, this is the tip of the iceberg. Going for iOS is easy because one can frame a bunch of "open competition" arguments since the platform takes on the appearance of a general computing platform. However once the laws are in, you can bet it'll be used to crack open every kind of closed model (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Kindle, etc) to the sole benefit of large incumbents that wish to exist as parasites to popular platforms.
Meanwhile the consumer doesn't get anything new out of this, they don't get better competition nor cheaper prices, but they now have to watch out for fraud and malware.
The same thing that happened to Windows Media Player, they got replaced by streaming. Anyone tech savvy enough to still use local digital media playback uses freeware and open source like VLC which have a lot more compatibility.
I no longer recommend VLC for music playback. They resample audio (change its playback rate and pitch away from nominal hardware rate / audio file rate) for some reason, and this algorithm breaks down especially when you seek, causing files to randomly be pitched up and down by nearly a semitone at worst. The bug has been reported for many years now, I recently found the exact circumstances, reproduction instructions, and a workaround (disable audio resampling), but not a fix: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/14287. Note that disabling audio resampling may impair AV sync.
Foobar2000 isn’t open source, so that probably disqualifies it for many VLC users. It also has UI weirdness like VLC, but differently weird. I guess that’s less of an issue than it could be, but the Android version of foobar2000 doesn’t have an obvious Play All/Shuffle All button when in shuffle mode, among other quirky situations that other players handle better.
Haven’t tried DeaDBeeF to my knowledge, but it seems vaguely familiar, so maybe I did way back in the day.
I haven’t really used local music much since I started streaming music. I never would have guessed that shift would occur. I’m finding the value in local media lately, though. I know that remote streaming assets can disappear anytime, and now plan for that eventuality. Building a local media library feels sustainable and fun again, and discovery has a companion goal of collecting.
foobar2000 works on Windows and runs fairly well on Wine, and has a lot of game music emulation plugins (which I use heavily unlike most people). Audacious runs on Linux, and has some game music emulation plugins (not as rich and configurable as foobar2000 though). I haven't noticed audible pitch shifts yet, but don't know for sure whether they ever resample, drift, or drift audibly. Another option is mpv and the various UIs, which support video as well as audio.
I use Clementine (or its more recent fork, Strawberry) as my FOSS music player on Windows. It's also available for GNU/Linux, but I just use mpd + vimpc on my Linux machine.
I'm actually not sure this is entirely accurate; I used a Mac basically all my life (OS 7 all the way to current) and never had a Windows based machine until well into my 20's, so Quicktime and I were good friends for a long time.
We also fought a lot when it came to the early days of torrenting anime and movies. I don't think Streaming and QuickTime really ever cross paths. It just didn't support as many fancy features that VLC and Media Player with the various Codec packs did, and later on players like MPV absolutely overwhelmed QuickTime in terms of playback and feature sets.
I have vague memories that QuickTime used to come with the iTunes package for Windows, but I may be wrong on this so don't quote me on it. I do distinctly remember a period of time when many people who had Windows would ask how QuickTime got on their system.
From the Mac side of things, QuickTime always felt like it didn't know what it should be. It was aways a sort-of media player without all the library features and playback features the other players had, along with a very basic media editor, media converter/exporter, and a few other bells and whistles that were neat but no one used and very few people wanted to pay for.
Eventually I think Apple just realized there was no sense in maintaining it as a priority. As I wrote this post, I realized that on Big Sur, the dictionary no longer corrects QuickTime like it corrects iTunes or iMac or many other Apple products. (amusingly, apple seems to have had the self restraint not to assume you mean the company and not the fruit when writing apple, just a neat little fact ;))
Ultimately though, I don't think streaming and QuickTime really were enemies at all. I don't think streaming was even really a thing by the time QuickTime was really relegated to "that app you accidentally open movies in sometimes." Now it just is a media player that sticks around because you have to have a media player with your OS or the other OSes will make fun of you.
> I have vague memories that QuickTime used to come with the iTunes package for Windows, but I may be wrong on this so don't quote me on it.
It did, because QuickTime is/was a media handling framework. The article isn't talking about the QuickTime Player application except incidentally. When you were using the Mac on OS 7 up until about 2011 (with the introduction of AVFoundation), just about everything that was playing media using Carbon or Cocoa API calls was using QuickTime under the hood.
When Apple ported QuickTime Player to Windows, they ported the QuickTime framework, too -- and iTunes for Windows was built to use that. So QTP basically came along for the ride whether you wanted it to or not. I don't know if this is still the case, though.
I was initially confused
OS 7 was for me ‘System 7.x’ (partially also triggered by the ‘used all my life’) - then year 2011 was mentioned and I understood that it was only a partial version number that was noted and the reference was actually for ‘Mac OS X 10.7.x’
> As I wrote this post, I realized that on Big Sur, the dictionary no longer corrects QuickTime like it corrects iTunes or iMac or many other Apple products
This would be odd since the video player in the very latest macOS is still called "QuickTime Player" even though QuickTime is no longer involved. Indeed on Monterey it's autocorrecting completely for me
The article is clearly talking about QuickTime as a framework, and while it touches on its widespread use on Windows, it's primarily talking about QuickTime on the Mac, which was replaced by AVFoundation.
(Also, the current version of the QuickTime Player -- and, of course, AVFoundation -- handles streaming perfectly well, although I doubt many people use QTP for that.)
Hassling with it on Windows was always a big pain, with the versions being incompatible to one another. Also it left so much bloat and changed so many settings it looked like malware. But to be fair most of those crude media applications did that at this time. (Looking at you, Realplayer!)
Also you needed the browser (Internet Explorer) plugin, because HTML5 video wasn't a thing, but everyone wanted to display their media.
In a sidenote QuickTime also was part of other installers, too. One big CAD application needed QT on the system for displaying their help files (and I guess some media im-/export). It wouldn't even install without it. To make things worse, the installer itself – not the app, mind you – was in Java. To uninstall now you both need an old Java and an old QuickTime to be installed first...