QuickTime 6.5 Released: Adds Support For 3GPP, 3GPP2, Enhanced DV Playback

by , 1:00 PM EST, December 18th, 2003

QuickTime 6.5 is here, and available as a free download. QuickTime 6.5 adds support for mobile phone technologies like 3GPP and 3GPP2, as well as enhanced DV playback for use in Apple products such as iMovie, iDVD, and Final Cut Pro. Apple also notes in its press release that QuickTime 6.x has been downloaded 175 million times. Apple's press release:

Apple today announced QuickTime 6.5, the industry's first mainstream media architecture for the creation and playback of rich multimedia content for both CDMA 2000 and GSM wireless networks. Expanding its support for mobile multimedia standards to include both 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2), QuickTime 6.5 enables users to share high-quality video, audio and text across the two predominant wireless networking technologies worldwide. QuickTime 6.5 will add to the existing popularity of QuickTime 6, which has already had over 175 million downloads in less than 18 months since its release.

QuickTime 6.5 delivers extensive support for the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards, including Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) and Qualcomm Code Excited Linear Predictive (QCELP) audio codecs, MPEG-4 and H.263 video codecs, 3G Timed Text, native .3gp and .3g2 file formats as well as support for Movie Fragments, which provide mobile operators and content providers with the advantages of real-time streaming within their existing web infrastructure.

Additional features of QuickTime 6.5 include cross-platform Unicode text support, enhanced DV playback, and performance improvements for iMovie, iDVD and Final Cut Pro.

QuickTime is Apple's industry-leading, standards-based software for developing, producing and delivering high-quality audio and video over IP, wireless and broadband networks. As the platform of choice for content creators worldwide, QuickTime delivers the full media experience for thousands of unique software titles and enhanced music CDs. QuickTime was chosen by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the base file format for MPEG-4 and is at the core of the 3GPP and 3GPP2 standards.

You can download the update through your Software Update Control Panel, or you can visit Apple's QuickTime Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

It's interesting to see Apple adding support for more mobile-communication technologies. You may remember Steve Jobs saying that he felt the PDA would be subsumed by the mobile phones, and here we see Apple positioning one of its major technology platforms as a mobile phone platform.

In fact, the press release included a fluff quote from Makoto Takahashi, vice president and general manager of KDDI’s Content Business Planning Department, Solution Business Sector. Mr. Takahashi said "Over 6.5 million KDDI and Okinawa Cellular customers can now use QuickTime 6.5 exclusively to create and play back 'EZmovie' content on their desktops taking advantage of both our popular AMC format and the 3GPP2 standard."

It's definitely a fluff quote, but its inclusion shows Apple's interest in this market. Apple as a player in the mobile phone market could well mean significant licensing revenue for the company.

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