Quicktime facing end of life soon. Apple dropping
32bit-Support in MacOS thus cutting off Quicktime,
Cinepak, Radium and DivX video codec support.
This means 64bit-capable codes are the only choice.

WIth Apple completely cutting support for 32bit applications and ressources and thus fulfilling the complete migration to 64bit environment, there’s no more support for the above codecs anymore as there was no 64bit version available ever. So even the playback will now become a challenge as there’s no playback codec also. If you get a video encoded with one of these codecs, then your Mac will refuse playback in MacOS 10.15 and newer.

So now it’s time to consider alternatives and if you posssess video files that come with the old codec format, you will want to re-encode them to newer formats like HEVC (x265) or MP4 (x264)

Although there’s Quicktime X available as 64bit version it lacks a lot of features Quicktime 7 is offering. That’s why Quicktime 7 can still be installled side-by-side with Quicktime X although Quicktime 7 has survived it’s retirement 9 years ago. But now it really is the time to say goodbye to Quicktime 7 as there will be definitely no transition of it into the 64bit era.

If you think that Quicktime 7 is dead anyway, think again: Many podcasters and even companies like Lucasfilm still rely on the swiss army knife of multimedia. So even big fishes in the pond will have to seek for alternatives now. And the main question is, why is Apple making their loyal users grumpy offering a crippled version of QuickTime with the X version released. Why was Quicktime 7 not properly transited to 64bit making it ready for the modern era. There are severyl considerations why Apple would have done good making QuickTime the first-choice-tool for multimedia on MacOS.

Even in Windows QuickTime was often preferred to other video solutions as it offered quick video cutting and editing from inside the Quicktime Pro Player. And it wasn’t expensive either. While competitors were way above 100 US$ if you sought for a fast and reliable video editor handling AVI files for example, QuickTime was ahead of it’s time and offering all that for ony 30 US$ back then. And with it’s efficient compression with way less compression artifacts, QuickTime even challenged the MPEG 4 video format for a long time.

With the Release of HEVC video compression (x265) things however have changed. But imagine when x265 became available to the public. That was in 2013, to be exact. 4 years AFTER Quicktime 7 has been seen dead.

Anyway, time has changed, there are a lot of free tools now online offering basic cutting features and which let you export the edited video to x265 directly. Even Apple itself relies on HEVC and natively supports playback inside MacOS and iOS.

So although QuickTime is with us for more than 20 years now, it’s time to say “Farewell and thank you for everything!”