How come Apple has not come out with a Quicktime plugin for Linux?
Because it’s not cost effective. Apple’s market is NOT tech-savvy geeks, it’s mac users and people who interact with them. Linux users are such a small segment of the population as to make it not worth developing a plugin for.
Since Quicktime 6 Video is ISO MPEG4 compliant, it can be viewed on Linux and nearly every other operating system. Apple’s tools are not required.
It’s the Sorenson codec used by some versions of Quicktime that’s the problem. IIRC, Apple says Sorenson won’t give them a license to make a linux version and Sorenson says the same thing about Apple. This has been going on for years.
Most Quicktime movies I’ve run into lately (not a very large sample…) work fine with Xine 0.9.13. YMMV.