QuickTime (.qt, .mov)

Video (and audio) container format developed by Apple. QuickTime is like AVI or ASF, because it doesn't define the actual compression technology the video has to use, but just defines the video structure instead.

Despite this, term QuickTime is normally used to refer to Apple's own (or licensed, in both cases mostly meant for streaming) video encoding technology that used to produce pretty bad video quality -- something that could be compared to RealVideo format.

Recently (since 2002), Apple has started using MPEG-4 video encoding on its QT streams, producing much better, if not excellent, video quality. Reason for this has been the huge demand from Hollywood to come up with an universal standard -- such as MPEG-4 -- that would produce good quality video for broadband use.