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Adding Multimedia Playback Capability

In this chapter, you’ll add multimedia playback to your QTKitPlayer, working with the tools available to you in Interface Builder and Xcode 2.0. The goal is, as in previous chapters, to build on the code you’ve written and the interface you’ve constructed, so that you can enhance the capabilities of the QTKitPlayer—with a minimum of programming effort.

When completed, the results will be dramatic and visually exciting: a multimedia playback engine capable of simultaneously playing in real time as many as six different QuickTime movies, QuickTime VR panoramas and object movies, streaming audio and video, animation and wired sprite movies, and other content that QuickTime can import and display. The user experience will be enhanced and require some degree of interactivity with the multimedia content that is displayed. Just controlling multichannel sound or interactive VR movies will alter the user experience.

In the completed project, you’ll add a new menu title, Studio, to the QTKitPlayer and a menu item, Present Movies. You’ll also add code to open and display all six QuickTime movies in a window, with multiple—and resizable—views of each movie.

Clicking a button in the Play Multimedia Content window will open a dialog box from which users will be able to select any movie or media type of their choice (Figure 6-1). After each movie is chosen, a new dialog box appears, prompting the user for another selection until the user has populated the window with all six QuickTime movies, as shown in Figure 6-2.

The window in which the movies are displayed can be resized to full screen for maximum visual impact and the toolbar at the top can be collapsed for a kiosk-like effect. The three movies displayed at the top of window contain an NSSplitView, while an NSTabView is provided for two movies and a text view below, and an NSScrollView with a movie appears in the right corner of the window.

The intended effect is for some degree of user interactivity with one or all of the QuickTime movies displayed, either by splitting the views and tabbing through them, or starting and stopping the playback of each movie. If all six movies are different QuickTime VR panoramas or object movies, for example, the user will be able to point and click through a variety of landscapes or hotspots from different points of view. The result is a heightened user experience.

Users may interact as they would with a multimedia kiosk or presentation, playing each movie at a different rate using the playback commands available in the QTKitPlayer.

At the programming level, each movie is simply a QTMovieView object and is intended to interact with other standard Cocoa views. The Show Movies button in the Play Multimedia Content window will launch each of the six dialogs that enable the user to choose a movie for display and playback. Users can then control the playback of each movie using the commands available in the QTKitPlayer to start, stop, go to the beginning, go to the end, show poster frame, step forward and step backward. Movies can also be controlled by toggling the spacebar to start and stop playback. Movie editing, however, is not enabled for any movie being displayed.

If you’ve worked through the examples in the previous chapters, you’ll be ready to move ahead with constructing and coding the multimedia playback enhancement for your QTKitPlayer.

Contents:

Tasks to Accomplish
Constructing The Multimedia Playback Engine
Adding Code To Display and Playback Multimedia
The Completed QTKit Multimedia Player

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