Er, sorry, yes, the video /formats/ are unfortunately defined by the available media encoder backends, but it's more that I don't have to write any platform or

Er, sorry, yes, the video /formats/ are unfortunately defined by the available media encoder backends, but it's more that I don't have to write any platform or media backend specific code to e.g. show video from a webcam, have a video player control, or record and save audio, etc etc. So your code remains the same, all you need to do is bundle codecs when shipping, or make sure you use formats that the default media backends of most platforms support. This might help: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5.5.0_Multimedia_Backends https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_5.5.0_Multimedia_Backends If you get a format that all of Directshow(win), AV Foundation(osx) and Gstreamer(linux) support, you're pretty much set. Something like mp4 container with h.264 video and mp3 audio is pretty standard these days.