Apple's QuickTime 5 in Beta 9

The latest version of Apple's industry-leading software for creating, streaming and playing high-quality audio and video over the Internet has reached beta 9 of its late developmental stages.

As of beta 8 of the QuickTime 5.0 software, which was frozen for seeding on the 24th of January, Apple has begun to add functionality to the new QuickTime 5.0 Setup Assistant that is expected to ship as part of the release. Currently, the assistant contains two dialogs: one sporting a welcome message, and the second allowing users to customize the functionality of the software's browser plug-ins. The latter dialog provides check-box options for automatically playing movies as they download, saving movies in the browser's disk cache, or enabling Kiosk mode. The dialog also provides a gateway to customizing QuickTime 5's MIME settings.

Also new to later versions of the QuickTime 5 beta is a wide-screen Hot Picks stream media window that automatically appears on the screen and connects to Apple's QuickTime streaming servers when movie player is launched from the Finder.

A number of bugs still remain in the late builds, however. One such bug affects Netscape Navigator, where it resets a few of the browsers preferences, sources said.

QuickTime 5.0 Public Preview 3

Apple has already released two Public Preview Betas of QuickTime 5.0 and plans to release a third in the coming week. The company's February 5th build of the media software, QuickTime 5.0 b9c2, has been designated as QuickTime 5 Public Preview 3. As with any late beta of Apple software, most of the recent changes are under the hood and not cosmetic.

Sources also noted that Apple's QuickTime Updater application can now update its self before logging in and updating the entire QuickTime package.

QuickTime 5.0 is due sometime later this year.