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Asked: 2026-05-10T16:11:49+00:00

There’s Quicktime SDK for Windows, but any application that uses it needs quicktime runtime

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There’s Quicktime SDK for Windows, but any application that uses it needs quicktime runtime libraries to be installed on the system (SDK itself just has headers and library stubs, and not the actual DLLs).

If my application uses Quicktime, I’d like to install the necessary libraries with it’s installer, thus not requiring user to install Quicktime separately. What I’m looking for is some sort of ‘quicktime redistributable’.

As of now (quicktime 7.x), I can’t find a way to do that. I could bundle whole quicktime installer (about 20 MiB), and launch it with MSI’s silent/unattended flag. However, that way it has several side effects:

  1. creates Quicktime player shortcut on desktop and in quick launch bar
  2. hijacks file associations, (e.g. .mov becomes associated with Quicktime Player, even if it was associated with something else before)
  3. installs some service/process (qttask) that presumably watches for Quicktime associations, or handles auto-updates.
  4. installs Quicktime Player, which I don’t need in fact.

Of the above, first three are quite bad.

Is there a way to ‘just install the libraries’ for Quicktime?

In my application, I’d use Quicktime to import images, movies and audio files in various formats. If there is no sane way to install Quicktime runtime without side effects (changed file associations, extra icons, …), then I should be seriously looking at alternative solutions (e.g. FreeImage to load images, perhaps DirectShow for video/audio).

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1 Answer

  1. If you need to redistribute QuickTime, see QuickTime Licensing for details. You’re not allowed to redistribute any of the QuickTime libraries without a written agreement with Apple. Many CD-replication companies will actually request proof of this agreement before printing large numbers of CDs.

    I would definitely not distribute ‘QuickTime Lite’ without consulting with either a lawyer or your Apple licensing representative.

    Your best bet, AFAIK, is to use the full QuickTime installer (all 20MB of it), and have your main installer run it with a ‘silent’ flag. That, at least, will allow your users to install QuickTime without a half-dozen dialogs (and without those annoying pictures of surfers in bikinis). The people at Apple’s licensing division seemed to think that using the ‘silent’ flag was acceptable, at least when we consulted them.

    One warning: If the user already has an older version of QuickTime 6 Pro (or earlier) installed, then installing QuickTime 7 silently will nuke their QuickTime Pro registration and they’ll have to repurchase it. We actually detect this situation in our installer and display a warning during the installation process, much like Apple does.

    Yes, this is a pain. After 6+ years of working with QuickTime, I’d honestly recommend looking at other video frameworks. We’re currently evaluating Ogg Theora.

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