QTVR files piqued my curiosity when I learned that the BBC had a virtual tour of a Victorian period room on its site:
The tour was right there, but I couldn’t view it! The Victorian Room and all the other related tours, were created in 2014 in a format that’s been abandoned by browsers – the QTVR format.
The “QuickTime Virtual Reality” (QTVR) format was developed by Apple to let you view an immersive panorama picture. You could click on “hot spots” to advance between scenes. Like an ancient Google Streetview from 2005. It was used on the web and in CD-ROM experiences like On Board the USS Enterprise.
Extracting a QTVR file from a website
Let’s say you found a website with a lot of virtual reality files, like this Columbia University Center for Teaching and Learning page. Most often, you’ll see a blank space where the panorama would’ve been:
Often, you can get the file by right clicking on the page, and selecting “View Source”. Search for the text .mov – that’s the file extension of these QTVRs.
Copy and paste that path into the URL bar and “save as” to your computer.
If your virtual tour file contains “hot spots” that let you advance between scenes, then you’ll have to dive into the file that you downloaded in order to find the “next URL” it links to.
To do that, open the .mov file in a text editor (like Notepad++ or Windows Notepad). And search for .mov again. You’ll see something like the following:
In the above screenshot “1Floor-7.mov” is the linked .mov file that you should download next. In our example, if the original file I downloaded lived on http://website.com/tours/tour1.mov then this next file from the screenshot would be hosted at http://website.com/tours/1Floor-7.mov
Viewing the QTVR Contents
If all you want to do is view the panorama/tour, then the best tool is QuickTime Viewer. This software was Discontinued in 2016 but is still available here: Quick Time 7.7.9 for windows (mirror of the file).
> Panorama viewing tips from the QuickTime 7 User Guide <
Viewing QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) Movies
QTVR movies display three-dimensional places (panoramas) and objects with which the
user can interact. With a QTVR panorama, it’s as if you’re standing in the scene and you
can look around you up to 360 degrees in any direction. In a QTVR movie of an object,
you can rotate the object in any direction.
To pan through a QTVR movie, drag the cursor through the scene. To zoom in or out,
click the + or – button. (If the buttons are not showing, zoom in by pressing Shift; zoom
out by pressing Control.)
16 Chapter 1 Using QuickTime Player
Some QTVR movies have hot spots that take you from one scene (or node) to another.
As you move the mouse over a hot spot, the cursor changes to an arrow. To see all the
places where you can jump from one node in a scene to another, click the Show Hot
Spot button (an arrow with a question mark in it). A translucent blue outline of any hot
spots within the currently visible VR scene appears. (If there are no hot spots, clicking
this button has no effect.) Click a hot spot to jump to a new scene.
To step backward scene by scene, click the Back button. (The Back button appears only
on QTVR movie windows, not in all QuickTime movie windows.)
Exporting standalone images
The simplest way to export individual images from QTVR files is to take a screenshot of your QuickTime 7 window with the file open. I’m serious.
For more modern versions of QTVR, you can export an entire scene using the FFmpeg video conversion tool. Download it from ffmpeg.org and add it to your computer’s PATH environment variable.
Open the Command Prompt and navigate to the folder with your .mov file. Then run the following command:
ffmpeg -i yourfile.mov %02d.jpgThis should create 6 .jpeg files with names like “01.jpg”, “02.jpg” and so on – representing the entire scene:
You may get a few dozen files in a horizontal/vertical strip that represents your photosphere. I recommend going to this online JPEG merging tool to combine them all into 1 whole – it’s more straightforward than other options I explored.
You can quickly view your resulting file as a photosphere by uploading it to the Photo Sphere Viewer playground.
Anders Jirås has a fantastic tutorial for extracting panoramas from QTVR files using FFmpeg (archive link). And even a tutorial for extracting panormas from SWF (Flash) files!
The BBC’s virtual tour was created with an old encoding: Cinepak. So FFmpeg could not extract the images. I had to use an alternative:
Creating a video from a VR sphere
You can convert a QTVR file into a regular Quicktime video using the Pano2Movie application. The output video will show the viewport moving according to your recorded movements. That file should be simpler to convert to a modern format than the original QTVR file.
Pano2Movie can also export your movements as a series of static images.
Pano2Movie is hugely temperamental. It’s slow and takes tweaking. Some tips for generating a series of images:
- First, you need to record a “path” through the panorama
- Set the Frames Per Second. Below I have it set to 15 – so there will be 15 JPEGs exported for every second of movement
- To reduce the number of images you generate, lower the “Duration” figure for the keyframes at the bottom of the screen.
You can download Pano2Movie 2.0.2 for Windows from CNet. (local mirror). There is also a later version for Mac, 2.1.73.
Stitching up a big panorama image
You can combine screenshots / static pictures from Pano2Movie into one big image that you can view and use for interactive HTML5 photospheres. For that, you’ll need Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE). ICE automatically detects overlapping regions in your image and stitches them together.
For the BBC Victorian Room, here are the Pano2Movie images I fed into ICE:
And here is the output:
Creating an interactive web panorama
I’m going to recommend Pano2VR as a tool for converting old QTVR files to working interactive experiences. This tool looks especially friendly for creating multi-node journeys. It costs 450 Euros.
Pano2VR could not handle the older Cinepak BBC file, but it could handle a newer panorama of the Words And Pictures Museum that I got from the Altered Earth website.
The free version of the software adds a watermark, that you can see below. Click on the image to get the interactive experience:
If you want to create a web-based panorama experience for free, then you’ll need to use a Javascript library – like the fantastic Photo Sphere Viewer.
If the images you extracted fit together into 1 long horizontal strip (made with the ICE tool or through the online JPEG merger) then you just need to provide your image as an input to the default Javascript code. If your .QTVR file gave out 6 square images, with two of them representing the ceiling & floor, then you’ll need to set up the Cubemap adapter with the 6 images that you got out of FFmpeg.
Panorama of the Words And Pictures Museum
During my QTVR research, I discovered an online tour of the Words And Pictures Museum from 1998. The museum was located in Northampton, Massachusetts and it shut down in 1999.
I love preserving a place that no longer exists, so it would be totally out of character if I didn’t preserve this one!
Street outside
First floor
Second Floor
Third floor
Fourth floor
The roof
Photographed by A.C. & Ellen Sullivan Farley
© Copyright 1998 A.C. Farley
Parting words
Dear reader, now it is your turn to find more QTVR files and rehost them.
If you found the information in this post useful, or you’ve written about your own QTVR adventures, then email me at “jacob” at this site.
Appendix
How Apple created 360 degree views of their products using QTVR.
Other tools:
- freepv open source panorama viewer
- File juicer for mac – extract embedded files. Might be able to extract images out of QTVR files.
- CubicConverter and CubicConnector for Mac.
More tech oldies
Heroes never die, they just fade away:
