title: Installing just Quicktime libraries on Windows
body: <p>There's <a href="http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/download/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Quicktime SDK</a> for Windows, but any application that uses it needs quicktime runtime libraries to be installed on the system (SDK itself just has headers and library stubs, and not the actual DLLs).</p>
  
  <p>If my application uses Quicktime, I'd like to install the necessary libraries with it's installer, thus not requiring user to install Quicktime separately. What I'm looking for is some sort of "quicktime redistributable".</p>
  
  <p>As of now (quicktime 7.x), I can't find a way to do that. I could bundle whole quicktime installer (about 20 MiB), and launch it with MSI's silent/unattended flag. However, that way it has several side effects:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>creates Quicktime player shortcut on desktop and in quick launch bar</li>
  <li>hijacks file associations, (e.g. .mov becomes associated with Quicktime Player, even if it was associated with something else before)</li>
  <li>installs some service/process (qttask) that presumably watches for Quicktime associations, or handles auto-updates.</li>
  <li>installs Quicktime Player, which I don't need in fact.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Of the above, first three are quite bad.</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to "just install the libraries" for Quicktime?</p>
  
  <p>In my application, I'd use Quicktime to import images, movies and audio files in various formats. If there is no sane way to install Quicktime runtime without side effects (changed file associations, extra icons, ...), then I should be seriously looking at alternative solutions (e.g. FreeImage to load images, perhaps DirectShow for video/audio).</p>