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Comment by parl_match | Hacker News Reader

QuickTime is a very legacy format, one that even apple seems to have internally pared down heavily. It's one of the first, and it's going to have rough edges.

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The container is a great format, battle-tested, easy to parse and generate. It's really good!

If the word "legacy" comes to mind I'd guess that you're thinking about 90s-era video codecs. This article is about the file/container format, which was directly adopted as the MPEG-4 file format, which becamse generalized as ISOBMFF (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format), which won an Emmy in 2021. It's a modern, flexible, extensible format, and so is likely to be around long after we're gone.

The only significant rough edge in the QuickTime container format that I know if is the means for extending atom sizes and data offsets to 64 bits. Otherwise it’s extremely clean, especially given that it was designed almost 35 years ago.

A legacy format... that still lives on as the mp4 container.

that's not entirely accurate. quicktime has been extended after MP4 container was standardized. so, the MP4 container was based on the version of QT at the time. For example, the color atom was added after that to help players with knowing how to interpret SD/HD colors. They've deprecated using the CLASP and other older features as well. So QT isn't just a locked format living along as MP4.

Some apps like MediaInfo will report an MOV with prores and pcm audio as MP4 though, so some people still seem confused.

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