PRESS RELEASE 04 June 2002

Apple Announces Public Preview of QuickTime 6

Industry’s First Mainstream ISO-Compliant MPEG-4 Encoder, Player & Broadcaster

CUPERTINO, California - June 4th, 2002
Apple today announced that the publicpreview of QuickTime 6 is now available as a free download from the Apple UK and Ireland Web site for both Mac and Windows. QuickTime 6 isthe industry’s first mainstream MPEG-4 solution for streaming media to allMPEG-4 compliant players. In addition, Apple announced the public preview ofQuickTime Broadcaster, which captures and encodes QuickTime content inMPEG-4 for live streaming over the Web.
MPEG-4, the next-generation international standard for digital video, wascreated by the group that created MPEG-2, the “gold standard” of digitalvideo used by every DVD player and DVD. There are hundreds of companiescommitted to the MPEG-4 standard, including Apple, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel,Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, Panasonic, Phillips, Real Networks,Samsung and Sun.
“QuickTime 6 delivers the world’s first complete media solution forcreating, streaming and viewing MPEG-4 content”, said Steve Jobs, Apple’sCEO. “MPEG-4 is an open standard being adopted by wireless, computer andentertainment companies around the world because it delivers the highestquality digital video, and allows content creators to scale thequality/bandwidth trade-off all the way from MPEG-2 quality to dramaticallylower bandwidths for streaming over the Internet”.
QuickTime 6 includes the new Instant-On Streaming feature that eliminatesfrustrating buffer delays and provides users with the ability to quickly andeasily scrub through streaming media content to locate and instantly viewspecific sections. In addition, QuickTime 6 running on Mac OS X now supportsJPEG 2000, the next generation JPEG standard that allows users to capturestill images in a higher quality and smaller file size than ever before.
QuickTime 6 also includes Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), the standard MPEG-4audio format. AAC is the next-generation professional-quality audio formatthat delivers vastly superior sound quality at drastically reduced filesizes — better than MP3 and better than Windows Media Player (WMA).
Additional features of QuickTime 6 include:
 
  • a new ISO-compliant video codec for encoding and decoding MPEG-4 videocontent;
  •  
  • adherence to the Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) 1.0specification;
  • DVC Pro (PAL) support; and
  • an updated user interface for easier access to QuickTime content.

Key features of QuickTime Broadcaster include:
  • live encoding with real-time preview;
  • the ability to record and hint in real-time to the computer’s hard disk for quick video-on-demand posting;
  • support for QuickTime codecs as well as MPEG-4 video and AAC audio;
  • AppleScript support;
  • the ability to create custom settings;
  • support for reliable communication via TCP between Broadcaster andServer; and
  • auto configuration of connections between Broadcaster and Server.

 
 
Press Contacts:
Apple UK and Ireland Public Relations
Email: [email protected]
Phone: +44 (0)20 8218 1440
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