And those formats had to be kept proprietary and closed so that the MPEG LA patent holders couldn’t analyse the specification and assert patents on it (Microsoft made the mistake of opening WMV9 as VC-1 under the belief it didn’t violate any patents, and ooops! the patent holders started pointing at parts of the specification and asserting patents on them, so a MPEG LA patent pool was formed).

So, many companies big and small (Microsoft, Apple, Sorenson, Real Media, Duck/On2) started developing proprietary codecs to provide an option for royalty-free internet video that was better than M-JPEG. You see, Mpeg1, Mpeg2 and Mpeg4 Part 2 all required a “content fee” but didn’t offer much of a bitrate advantage over M-JPEG to justify that cost. Look, I understand why so many companies developed proprietary video stream formats in the 1990s and 2000s. The only “advantage” of MOV nowadays is that it can include non-compatible audio (using the Apple audio formats) in order to make conversion to standard MP4 harder. What “choice” is there exactly? For a long time now, MOV/QT stopped evolving its proprietary formats and they went with AVC/H.264. To give credit where credit is due, Microsoft did the right thing and made sure there is no confusion between DirectShow and the WMV and WMA formats by simply giving them separate names instead of going down the “let’s confuse everyone” route like Apple did when they named everything “QuickTime”. So, we are now in the situation where QuickTime (the framework) is dead but QuickTime (the format) lives on because those old videos have to be playable, so you hear confusing statements such as “QuickTime is dead but you can still play QuickTime media”. But anyway MOV/QT is a format in its own right, and it’s also called “QuickTime”. Files with a MOV extension can also take AVC/H.264 video streams like MP4 files can and can also take M-JPEG (Nikon cameras used this).

And although the container is the same specification which defines the MP4 container, MOV and QT files are allowed to contain additional proprietary video streams (the most common being Road Pizza aka RPZA and Sorenson Media Video 1 and 3 aka SVQ1 and SVQ3). It’s also a video format (it uses the filename extensions MOV and QT).

It’s more than a framework (set of libraries).

Xvid codec for mac streaming