There's more than meets the eye to this whole "QuickTime bug" issue that's come out of the "Redmond Justice" trial. If you're a little behind on the plot, here's the broad strokes: Apple's software veep Avie Tevanian was called as a witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial and alleged, among other things, that Microsoft had deliberately introduced bugs into Windows to prevent QuickTime from working properly. These bugs essentially produced an error message that prompted the user to ditch QuickTime and switch back to Microsoft's competing ActiveMovie product. Then, just after Avie left the stand, Microsoft issued a press release stating that the bugs in question were in fact in QuickTime, not in Windows, and the whole problem was due to Apple's programming errors. They even had a third-party testing company, Mindcraft, publicly state that Apple's bugs were to blame. The bug is basically that QuickTime doesn't properly register three of eleven filename extensions with Windows-- namely, ".qt," ".vfw," and ".aifc."

However, as a MacInTouch reader points out, Apple's own specs for QuickTime Digital Video File Formats show something a little fishy about that allegation. According to those specs, none of those three "improperly supported" filename extensions is actually a valid filename extension at all. For instance, a QuickTime movie under Windows should be "filename.mov" and not "filename.qt." Likewise, Video for Windows movies should be "filename.avi," not "filename.vfw." If we recall, Windows doesn't have type and creator codes like the Mac OS, so the only way for the system to identify file types is by the filename extension. Start using incorrect filename extensions and, well, it's no surprise that things break. (If you have to use Windows, try changing your "filename.doc" Word document into "filename.xls", double-click on the file, and watch Excel try to open it.) Which leads us to believe that maybe an older version of QuickTime for Windows did recognize ".qt" files as QuickTime movies, even if it "shouldn't have," and Microsoft then introduced the filename extension into Windows; then, once a newer version of QuickTime shipped that stuck to the specifications and eliminated support for those extensions, up popped the error messages.

Whatever... As far as we can tell, it's really all speculation at this point. Of course, Apple could probably clear this all up pretty quickly just by issuing a press release of its own addressing these issues. (Their silence sure seems like a tacit admission of wrongdoing.) What seems clear to us, though, is that the "bugs" in QuickTime for Windows aren't really bugs at all; the problem lies in Windows, as Apple alleged from the beginning, and stem from the system using filename extensions not documented in QuickTime's specifications. Whether or not Microsoft introduced those bugs on purpose is probably going to be a subject of debate that will echo through the ages.