At the heart of Apple's hugely popular iLife software suite--iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, GarageBand, and iTunes--is QuickTime, the powerful media engine that drives elegant applications for managing movies, images, and audio files. The enduring success of QuickTime is in no small part attributable to its component architecture. This key feature has allowed it to embrace emerging digital media technologies and standards one by one as they have appeared over the 12 or so years since its launch. None of the competing technologies even comes close, let alone on both Mac OS X and Windows....