Media formats supported by QuickTime Player

Summary

QuickTime Player natively supports the following media formats and codec components. You can also extend QuickTime to support additional codecs and components.

Products Affected

OS X Lion, OS X Mountain Lion, QuickTime X

Below are the media formats and codecs that QuickTime Player can play back in Mac OS X v10.6.x or later:

Video
  • QuickTime Movie (.mov)
  • MPEG-4 (.mp4, .m4v)
  • MPEG-2 (OS X Lion or later)
  • MPEG-1
  • 3GPP
  • 3GPP2
  • AVCHD (OS X Mountain Lion only)
  • AVI
  • DV
  • MPEG-2 (OS X Lion or later)
  • MPEG-4 (Part 2)
  • H.264
  • H.263
  • H.261
  • Apple ProRes
  • Apple Pixlet
  • Animation
  • Cinepak
  • Component Video
  • DV
  • DVC Pro 50
  • Graphics
  • Motion JPEG
  • Photo JPEG
  • Sorenson Video 2
  • Sorenson Video 3

Audio
  • iTunes Audio (.m4a, .m4b, .m4p)
  • MP3
  • Core Audio (.caf)
  • AIFF
  • AU
  • SD2
  • WAV
  • SND
  • AMR  
  • AAC (MPEG-4 Audio)
  • HE-AAC
  • Apple Lossless
  • MP3
  • AMR Narrowband
  • MS ADPCM
  • QDesign Music 2
  • Qualcomm PureVoice (QCELP)
  • IMA 4:1
  • MACE 3:1 (Mac OS X v10.6.x only)
  • MACE 6:1 (Mac OS X v10.6.x only)
  • ALaw 2:1
  • ULaw 2:1
  • 24-Bit Integer
  • 32-Bit Integer
  • 32-Bit Floating Point
  • 64-Bit Floating Point

Note: A more powerful Mac will deliver improved performance. AVCHD 3D content is converted to standard video for playback and export.
 

Adding additional media format support to QuickTime

You can also extend QuickTime to import or play other popular and specialized media formats using codec components. This article lists common Apple and third-party codec components and the filename extensions they support.

Important: Information about products not manufactured by Apple is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute Apple’s recommendation or endorsement. Please contact the vendor for additional information.
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