This week, Apple released Quicktime 7.6 in a major update which includes not only numerous security and bug fixes as well as considerable performance improvements. Other changes & new features follow below.

From Apple’s release notes, some of the new features include….

Video: Improves single-pass H.264 encoding quality / Increases the playback reliability of Motion JPEG media

Audio: Improves AAC encoding fidelity / Audio tracks from MPEG video files now export consistently

Application Support: Improves compatibility with iChat and Photo Booth

In our tests, framerates of Photo Booth videos are considerably improved, particularly under heavy CPU loads….and similar advances have been made with hardware-saturation scenarios for h.264 transcoding as well as many other resource-intensive functions.

All in all, we’re very impressed with QT 7.6 and can’t wait to spend more time hands-on with it; if you have experiences, bugs, or other feedback about Quicktime to share, please post to the comments, email us: rumors@macosrumors.com or contact us on the social networks — we’ve just opened a new Twitter account at http://twitter.com/macosrumors !