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When I was learning Portable Executable (PE) file format for windows, tools like PE-Explorer and PEView helped me in learning things quickly and nicely. Now, I need to learn and understand the apple quick time file format. Are there any
PS: I’m on windows and I don’t have mac/macOS
On Windows you can use MP4 Explorer, and since it is open source you can also learn from it. Since MP4 uses a similar structure to QuickTime you can use it for both.
There is also the old Dumpster tool from Apple. There is an old version of this tool for Windows, but I could not find it in the Apple developer site. This forum post has a copy that you can try. This is very old though, I’m not sure if it’ll work with recent QT files.
If you can obtain access to a Mac running OS X, then you can use Dumpster or Atom Explorer.
I don’t know of any public tool for this. Your best bet is to extend MP4 Explorer to do this, or write your own parser. Parsing the atoms is actually pretty simple, things start to get complicated when you need to interpret the content of the atoms and cross-reference them to, for example, locate where the frame data is.
The QuickTime file format specification is the best resource for Apple generated QuickTime files, but you may need to do some reverse engineering, as the spec is not very complete in some areas, like the handling of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 video. If you have access to ISO specs, then ISO/IEC 14496-12 is a standardized version of the QuickTime format (or better said, of a subset of it). The ISO/IEC 14496-15 specification builds on top of 14496-12 and defines a specific implementation of this format for the H.264 format. This is the so called MP4 format.
With the above three documents you should be pretty good in terms of documentation.