Apple’s been riding the ridge rather nice recently and its latest razor-edged QuickTime 4.0 is looking to take things even further. The cross-platform success of QuickTime has established it as a prominent “multimedia” format, but it hasn’t been able to compete with the like of RealNetworks and MP3 ... until now.

The new release will be previewed at NAB next week, showing off the MPEG-4 audio/video standard, MP3 streaming and the “QuickTime Player.” QuickTime 4.0 has a new modular architecture and has been broken down into smaller applications and system components than previous versions. The new suite now includes an updater that can be used to download new versions of components as they are made available.

“You can get piecemeal updates rather than this honking 7MB download everyone had to do periodically to get the latest version,” a source said. The QuickTime 4.0 installer gives the user four choices of software levels to install: basic (2 MB), deluxe (2.5 MB), authoring (5.3 MB), and custom.

If you are a Mac addict then this is good news, but there’s even more in the monitor section if you’re a RealProducer.