Apple's announcement last week that it would no longer update and/or provide security patches for the Windows version of QuickTime has left many user's in a lurch. The announcement prompted an alert from no less than the Department of Homeland Security, recommending that users of the software on the Windows platform should immediately uninstall it. There are 2

known vulnerabilties of the software that can allow remote control of your PC as well as remote code execution.  While the vulnerabilities have not been seen "in the wild" as yet, it's only a matter of time.

For most users, removing QuickTime from your Windows PC will be uneventful and will not have any repercussions.  For some users of Adobe's products, there may be a larger impact.  As Adobe explains:

Adobe has worked extensively on removing dependencies on QuickTime in its professional video, audio and digital imaging applications and native decoding of many .mov formats is available today (including uncompressed, DV, IMX, MPEG2, XDCAM, h264, JPEG, DNxHD, DNxHR, ProRes, AVCI and Cineform). Native export support is also possible for DV and Cineform in .mov wrappers.

Unfortunately, there are some codecs which remain dependent on QuickTime being installed on Windows, most notably Apple ProRes. We know how common this format is in many worfklows, and we continue to work hard to improve this situation, but have no estimated timeframe for native decode currently.

Other commonly used QuickTime formats which would be affected by the uninstallation of QuickTime include Animation (import and export), DNxHD/HR (export) as would workflows where growing QuickTime files are being used (although we strongly advise using MXF for this wherever possible).

They did announce it to Trend Micro last week, but unfortunately, as of this writing, Apple has not taken any action to inform its users that QuickTime for Windows will no longer be supported.  In fact, you can still download it from their website and install it without any warning. And if you already have iTunes, the Apple Software Updater program still presents QuickTime as one of the options for update/installation.

So the best advice we can give is to uninstall QuickTime now. You can do that on Windows 10 by selecting "Settings" from the Start Menu, select "Apps & Features" on the left menu, find “QuickTime” in the list and click on it, then click “Uninstall.” The QuickTime uninstaller will remove all of the installed QuickTime components on your PC, including the QuickTime desktop application and the QuickTime browser plug-in. Don’t see QuickTime in the list of Apps, then QuickTime isn't installed. No worries!