But all of this has been known about long before macOS Mojave was released in September this year. Apple has been working for 15 years to get rid of QuickTime as it is a 32-bit app. They replaced the QuickTime 7 player with a QuickTime X, which is now just called the QuickTime player. It’s all part of the dropping of QuickTime API which is 32-bit code and replacing it with AVFoundation which is 64-bit and is at the core of the current QuickTime player. Note that Apple is NOT killing the QuickTime Movie File format. That is still alive and well.

2 years ago we asked Non Lethal Applications, makers of Video Slave Pro about this when the QuickTime Windows security storm blew up and back in 2016 Flo Loferer the developer and owner of Non Lethal Applications shared his thoughts on the wider story of QuickTime...

The original QuickTime framework is 24 years old now [in 2016] which are a couple of centuries in computer time. While it was and still is a great engine, they never made the move to 64 bit.

Probably because the only people knowing all the innards of QuickTime are either dead or are no longer working for Apple. QuickTime really was MASSIVE! You could literally do EVERYTHING with it but as many parts were really old, it was a real pain!

Apple introduced a new platform called AVFoundation as a successor in OS X 10.6. Since OS X 10.9, QuickTime has been officially deprecated and might disappear in a new OS X release. [We now now this will be the next macOS after Mojave. Mike]. Although Apple is still extending AVFoundation, it’s still not as powerful as QuickTime. Especially regarding new codecs. AVFoundation can only handle a few codecs and there are no codec packs you can install to change that.

As far as I am aware, AVFoundation never made the jump to Windows. Probably because Windows now has powerful frameworks itself and there’s just no need to port the platform.

That’s probably also the reason why AVID moved to their own engine in Pro Tools (they used QuickTime before). Apple moved Logic’s video engine to AVFoundation with Logic 9 (I think) and they had to drop features like external video output which many users really hate.

A common confusion among many OS X users is QuickTime 7 versus QuickTime X on OS X. QuickTime 7 (Pro) uses the original QuickTime engine while QuickTime X uses the new AVFoundation framework. In my experience most users don’t know this and are always confused when they hear that. Who would think that an app called “QuickTime X” doesn’t use the original QuickTime engine.

All this deprecation does not include the QuickTime MOV file format by the way. This still is supported and is also used by AVFoundation.

In fact Apple initially warned that High Sierra would be the last OS to support 32 bit apps, but with the release of macOS Mojave they pushed that back to the OS to come after Mojave. Although Apple have not given specifics of which future macOS will drop support for these ‘legacy’ codecs, with the announcement that the replacement to macOS Mojave will drop support for 32-bit applications and QuickTime, it makes sense to plan towards the next macOS release, likely to be in September 2019, based on the release schedules for both High Sierra and Mojave. It all looks like Apple are closing more of the gates and protecting their own systems.

The Work Is Going To Need To Be Done In Apps Like Pro Tools And Media Composer