Libquicktime

This is the home of libquicktime, a library for reading and writing quicktime/avi/mp4 files. It provides convenient access to quicktime files with a variety of supported codecs.

Note:
libquicktime is in no way related to the original quicktime software, which can be found here. You should not expect all quicktime files created by original software to be playable by libquicktime or vice versa. You might, however, be lucky in some cases.

The goal is to have a simple and stable library, which can create reasonable compatible Quicktime and AVI files either uncompressed (for high-end or production applications) or with decent compression codecs for end user applications. Today, we write Quicktime files with a wide range of uncompressed codecs for professional use. Together with sample accurate seeking, this makes libquicktime the library of choice for editing applications.

Starting with version 0.9.9, libquicktime can also produce files for lots of consumer level players. AVIs for Divx players (with mp3 audio) can be written as well as multichannel H.264/AAC files for Quicktime 7. Furthermore, we encode fairly compatible MPEG-4 (.mp4) files. AAC audio files (.m4a) are also supported.

On the decoder side, the development goal is that libquicktime should at least be able to decode it's own files. If other formats or codecs be added with a reasonable amount of labour, they will be supported as well.

If you are looking for a general purpose library, which supports other formats than Quicktime/AVI and many more codecs, try gmerlin_avdecoder or ffmpeg.

Libquicktime is based on the quicktime4linux library, with the following extensions:

Currently, the whole discussion happens on the libquicktime-devel mailing list. Software developers, who are interested in this project, are welcome to subscribe to this list. The sourceforge project page is here.

Some documentation for the codec interface can be found here. Please note, that the codec interface isn't completely frozen yet, but this is roughly, what you can expect.

We also have a CVS repository. It's located here.