QuickTime For Linux

Quicktime 4 Linux was the first convenient way to read and write uncompressed Quicktime movies on Linux. Today Quicktime 4 Linux is intended mainly for content creation and uncompressed movies. These usually arise during the production phase and not the distribution phase of a movie. It has improvements in colormodel support, bit depth, accuracy, reliability, and codecs, while not stressing economy.

Quicktime 4 Linux is the foundation for many of the features of Cinelerra. It includes several front ends to encoders and decoders which are used by applications directly.

Included in Quicktime for Linux is a front end for the libdv engine. This front end was started when libdv was really crude. Since then, libdv has gotten better but the abstraction layer remains.

A parallel JPEG engine using libjpeg is implemented with a front end. This uses 2 processors for field based JPEG compression and 1 processor for frame based compression. It also supports some common marker operations.

COLORSPACE CONVERSION

A general colorspace converter implements colorspace conversion with nearest neighbor scaling for the large number of nonstandard colorspaces that Cinelerra uses.

Quicktime 4 Linux reads and writes some AVI files. AVI support has grown over the years, since this is of course the standard on Linux, but is continuously evolving since AVI is not consistent. Currently it reads and writes reasonably compatible AVI files less than or greater than 2GB. The AVI mode supports MJPG, DV, and some compressed codecs.

Be aware of one thing: Quicktime for Linux won't read any of the movies you download from the internet. Quicktime is a wrapper for many different kinds of compression formats. What you knew as "Quicktime 4", "Quicktime 5", "Quicktime 6", are really different distributions of compression formats. The codecs its support are mainly uncompressed.

You can download QuickTime 4 Linux at here.