Movie Files

Movie Formats

Movie Formats | Creating Movies | Movie Resources | Adding Movies to Web Pages | Going Further

QuickTime and MPEG are two of the most common cross platform movie formats currently in use. Of these, QuickTime is perhaps more popular because of its compatability and ability to synchronize multiple media streams. Players for QuickTime multimedia are freely available for the Macintosh, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000/XP from http://quicktime.apple.com/.

Actually, QuickTime is not really a movie format, but is a software development package that allows the synchronization of video, text, sound, and music. But the name "QuickTime" has come to be popularly applied to movies files that are produced using this package. Such files generally have either a .MOV or .QT extension. (Note that while the Quicktime players are free, the developer's package is a commercial product from Apple.)

Many movies that originate on Windows systems are produced in the AVI format (and have an .AVI extension). Windows users can view these movies with Windows Media Player that is included with their systems.

As was the case with sound, browsers themselves do not play movies that they receive from a server. Instead, they can be configured either to save a movie to a disk file, to pass the movie to a "helper" program that can play the movie, or to use a special plug-in to play the particular format. For the Macintosh, a freeware program Sparkle can be used to play both MPEG and QuickTime movies, and can also be used to convert between the two formats.