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QuickTime Media Skins

Typically, QuickTime Player displays movies in a rectangular display area within a draggable window frame. The frame has a brushed-metal appearance and rounded control buttons. The exact controls vary depending on the movie’s controller type, with most movies having the standard Movie Controller.

If the movie’s controller is set to the None Controller, QuickTime Player displays the movie in a very narrow frame with no control buttons. This allows you to display a movie without controls, or to create your own controls using a Flash track or wired sprites.

In QuickTime 5, however, you can customize the appearance of QuickTime Player by adding a media skin to your movie. A media skin is specific to the content and is part of the movie (just another track, essentially). It defines the size and shape of the window in which the movie is displayed A media skin also specifies which part of the window is draggable. Your movie is not surrounded by a frame. No controls are displayed, except those that you may have embedded in the movie using Flash or wired sprites.

For example, suppose you’ve created a movie with a curved frame and wired sprite controls, as shown in “Figure 1-13.”

Now suppose you want to add a media skin that specifies a window the size and shape of your curved frame, and a draggable area that corresponds to the frame itself.

If the movie is then played in QuickTime, your movie appears in a curved window, as shown in “Figure 1-14,” with the areas that you have specified acting as a draggable frame, as if you had created a custom movie player application.

You don’t need to assign the None Controller to a movie with a media skin (although you can). If the Movie Controller is assigned to your movie, the controller’s keyboard equivalents operate when your window is active, even though the controller is not displayed. The space bar starts and stops a linear movie, for example, while the shift key zooms in on a VR panorama. You can disable this feature by assigning the None Controller.

Media skins have no effect when a movie is played by the QuickTime browser plug-in or other QuickTime-aware applications, such as Adobe Acrobat. However, developers can modify their applications to recognize movies that contain Media Skins, and to retrieve the shape information.

The process of customizing the appearance of QuickTime Player by adding a media skin to a movie is diagrammed in “Figure 1-15.” It involves these basic steps:

1. You add a media skin to your video movie by using the add-scaled command.

2. Create black-and-white images to define the window and drag areas (masks).

3. Create an XML text file containing references to your files.

4. Save the text file with a name ending in .mov.

5. Open the movie in QuickTime Player, then Save the movie as a Self-contained.mov.

The key element in a media skin movie is the XML file. This file contains references pointing at three specific sources: the content (that is, any media that QuickTime “understands,” such as JPEG images, .mov, or .swf files), the Window mask and the Drag mask. The XML file is read by the XML importer in QuickTime, and the movie is then created on the fly from the assembly instructions in the XML file. When that occurs, you have a “skinned” movie that behaves in the same way that any other QuickTime movie behaves. The subsequent step shown in “Figure 1-15”––Save the movie as a Self-contained.mov––takes all of the referred elements and puts them into a specific file. That step, however, is optional.

Note that the Framed.mov in the diagram can be a Flash movie, or any other QuickTime movie.

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