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Using QuickTime in Your Application

QuickTime is Apple's cross-platform multimedia technology designed to help you create and deliver video, sound, animation, graphics, text, interactivity, and music. QuickTime supports dozens of file and compression formats for images, video, and audio, including ISO-compliant MPEG-4 video and AAC audio.

You can incorporate QuickTime features into your Cocoa applications in one of two ways. The easiest way is through the QuickTime Kit, which is a full-featured Objective-C based framework for the QuickTime interfaces. If you are already familiar with the C-based QuickTime interfaces, you can use those instead.

In this section:

Using the QuickTime Kit
Using QuickTime C-Based Functions

Using the QuickTime Kit

The QuickTime Kit framework (QTKit.framework) works with QuickTime movies in Cocoa applications in Mac OS X. The QuickTime Kit framework was introduced in Mac OS X v10.4 and was designed as an alternative to and eventual replacement for the existing NSMovie and NSMovieView classes in Cocoa. This new framework provides more extensive coverage of QuickTime functions and data types than had been offered by the Application Kit classes. More importantly, the framework does not require Cocoa programmers to be conversant with Carbon data types such as handles, aliases, file-system specifications, and so on.

The QuickTime Kit framework is available primarily in Mac OS X v10.4 and later, but it is also supported in Mac OS X v10.3 with QuickTime 7 or later installed. For information on how to use the QuickTime Kit, see QuickTime Kit Programming Guide. For a reference of the classes in the QuickTime Kit, see QuickTime Kit Framework Reference.

Using QuickTime C-Based Functions

Long before the introduction of the QuickTime Kit framework, QuickTime programs were written using a C-based API. The QuickTime API encompasses thousands of functions and gives you the maximum flexibility in managing QuickTime content. You can use this API in your Cocoa applications like you would any other framework.

For an introduction to QuickTime, see QuickTime Overview. For the complete QuickTime reference, see QuickTime Framework Reference.

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