This example shows the compatibility problems for a user whose machine is primarily set up for viewing or creating media on a Windows based system - in this case, a machine used for broadcast video post-production and non-broadcast multi-media production tasks. The workstation includes a Truevision Targa 2000 RTX board for audio/video digitizing and playback, and thus has the Truevision hardware M-JPEG and JPEG compressors available.

The first table shows the compressor formats that work with QuickTime 3.0 and which ones produce .mov files that can also be viewed with the QuickTime 2.1 player.

Note that this table did not show compressors that work with Quicktime 2.1 that are not supported by Quicktime 3.0 - for example, the Indeo 3.2 codec. In other words, the table above does not address the lack of full backward compatibility with Quicktime 2.1.

The following table shows the compressor formats that are available when creating .avi files on the example machine, and which of these available formats the QuickTime 3.0 player can show.

Note that if a user downloads and installs QuickTime 3.0 for their browser, only the avi's compressed with the formats "x'ed" above will be playable from the browser. This is because Quicktime takes over .avi playback even if the Windows media player (which CAN handle all these compressors) is available on the local machine.