Sample Chapter

Full-Screen Modes

There are currently five different full-screen modes that you can invoke from a Web page:

•   normal--movie plays at its normal size
•   double--movie is scaled up to double its normal size
•   half--movie is scaled down to half its normal size
•   current--movie plays at the size it was when last saved, which allows you to stretch or scale the movie to a custom size, then display it in full-screen mode
•   full--scales the movie up or down, as necessary, to fill the screen as completely as possible while preserving the movie's aspect ratio

Note  In some cases, QuickTime may also change the monitor resolution of a Macintosh temporarily while playing a movie in full-screen mode.

In all cases, the screen is cleared to black, the movie is centered on the screen, and it plays automatically. In some cases the movie fills the entire screen; in other cases there are black borders from movie edge to screen edge.

There are never any menus or controls. The movie plays until it ends or the viewer presses the Esc key. If the movie is set to loop, it plays repeatedly until the viewer presses Esc.

If the movie is also set to quit when done, QuickTime Player quits at the end of the movie.

If the viewer presses the Esc key during the movie, QuickTime Player drops out of full-screen mode--the movie is paused and displayed at the size at which it was last saved. If the viewer then restarts the movie, it plays normally, rather than in full-screen mode.

The movie can also drop out of full-screen mode if it is playing while downloading and the download can't keep up, forcing QuickTime to pause the movie. There are a few ways to prevent this from happening. They all involve techniques that we'll cover later in the book, but here they are:

•   You can deliver a movie who's data rate is lower than the available bandwidth. You'll learn how to automatically select the right movie for a viewer's connection speed in Alternate Realities: Language, Speed, and Connections
•   You can save the movie so that it doesn't fast start--it won't play until the whole file is available. You'll learn how to do this in Saving Movies.
•   You can put a low-bandwidth image or animation at the front of your movie and leave it there for several seconds, so the download gets well ahead in the movie timeline. Text is ideal for this, as you need some time to read it anyway. If the text is slowly scrolling, it's clear that the movie is playing, not hung. You'll learn how to put this kind of text into a movie in Text! Text! Text!
•   You can use wired sprites to monitor the movie's current time and the amount of movie time that has downloaded. If you're about to run out of data, the sprite can slow the movie's play rate to a virtual halt without actually stopping it, effectively pausing while the download gets ahead. We'll cover wired sprites in An Animated Approach and Getting Interactive

How to Set Full-Screen Mode

There are several different ways to set full-screen mode, but they fall into two broad categories: methods that set full-screen mode externally, without changing the movie itself, and methods that modify the movie internally so that it plays in full-screen mode by default.

One of the external methods you already know--you can write a three-line text file that plays a movie in full-screen mode. For details, flip back to Making a Reference Movie from a Text File (XML).

A very similar method is to create a SMIL presentation. SMIL is another XML-based way to pass movie URLs to QuickTime. I won't get into the details here--we'll cover that in SMIL for the Camera If all you want to do is play a single movie in full-screen mode, use the three-line method just described instead--it's simpler.

Use SMIL if you want to create a full-screen presentation composed of separate elements, such as a series of JPEGs and an audio file, without importing them all into QuickTime and editing them together.

The other methods of setting full-screen mode make a change to the movie itself.

If you have a Macintosh, by far the easiest way to make full-screen movies is to use AppleScript. There are scripts already written for you on the CD that came with this book--just drop a movie, or a folder full of movies, onto the script and stand back. The documentation for the scripts is on the CD as well. It's all in the AppleScript folder.

Another method that's almost as easy is to use one of the four full-screen movies in the SpecialDelivery folder of the CD: fullnormal .mov , fulldouble.mov , fullcustom.mov , or fullfull.mov . Here's how to use them:

1. Open your movie in QuickTime Player.
2. Select All. Copy. Close (don't save).
3. Open the full-screen movie with the desired mode: normal, double, custom, or full.
4. Add. Save As (self-contained).
Your new movie is a copy of your original movie with full-screen mode set.

The next method is either complex and expensive or completely trivial, depending on your other needs. You can use one of the more capable QuickTime application programs--Cleaner 5, Media Cleaner Pro 4, or LiveStage Pro--to set the full-screen mode in a movie.

These are powerful tools, and most serious QuickTime authors have at least one, if not all three.

If you already have one of these programs, it's as simple as clicking a tab and checking a box. You can set full-screen mode when making a movie in any of these programs. You can also use any of them to add full-screen mode to your existing movies. In Cleaner or Media Cleaner, click "Don't Recompress" to set a mode in an existing movie. In LiveStage, just open the movie, click the checkbox, and save.

If you don't already have one of these programs, prepare to spend a little money and a moderate amount of time learning something complex and interesting (you've gotten this far--obviously you have the aptitude). You'll be rewarded for your efforts.

And that concludes our discussion of full-screen movies.