Setting Up Your Encoding Software - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 500

QuickTime 7 now supports the H.264 format. A large number of other formats for
video, audio, still images, and animations are also supported.
QuickTime does not do anything by itself, since it is just a library of functionality. It
is the applications built on top of it that unleash the power. Even simple applications like
the movie player are useful for converting file formats. QuickTime is built into compres-
sion tools like Cleaner, Compression Master, and Squeeze to add functionality. These
invoke the QuickTime mechanisms, which will deliver the same coding process regardless
of what tool was used to call it. Some encoding frameworks may provide additional func-
tionality and a finer degree of control over the parameters (see Figure 30-8). Occasionally,
they also provide some extra codec plug-ins.
Table 30-5 lists the formats that QuickTime supports.
Although QuickTime 6 includes an MPEG-4 encoder, it is MPEG-4 Part 2 only and
not a very sophisticated profile. However, it is good enough for web video or mobile phone
applications. The encoding is reasonably quick but there are better implementations. The
H.264 codec will supersede this implementation in due course.
Do purchase the QuickTime Pro license. It is well worth the fee to get the
extra features.
Figure 30-8 Codec parameteriza-
tion.