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QuickTime Road Map

QuickTime is a large API, with over 2000 functions and dozens of components. Fortunately, you normally need to use only a small part of the QuickTime API to accomplish a given task.

The trick is to know what part of QuickTime to use for your purpose, and to find the documentation and sample code that can guide you. That’s what this roadmap is for.

QuickTime usually provides multiple ways to do the same thing: an easy way where most things are done for you, and a set of increasingly lower-level toolsets for doing it yourself. If you find that you’re immersed in something complicated and frustrating, when it ought to be simple, there’s a good chance that you’re using the wrong toolset. Come back to the roadmap and look for a higher-level approach.

Main Areas of Interest

The QuickTime API documentation is divided into 17 main areas, listed and linked below.

• Getting Started with QuickTime—Getting oriented, finding the sdks, suggested reading

• Fundamentals— QuickTime overview, quick-start tutorial, component manager, initializing QuickTime, opening and playing movies

• QuickTime for Windows—Aspects of QuickTime that are different in Windows

• Scripting—Control Apple’s QuickTime applications (player, browser plug-in, ActiveX control) with high-level scripting languages such as JavaScript, Visual Basic, AppleScript, HTML, and SMIL.

• Movie Basics—Initialize QuickTime, open and play movies, edit and save movies, work with QuickTime data types, set up callbacks to your application.

• Streaming—Work with streaming media using real-time protocols, do live broadcasts, or write components for the streaming server.

• Movie Internals—Work with movies at the track, property, and component level; set time scales and layers; rotate, skew, scale, and transform visual tracks; work with clock components, track references and modifier tracks, previews and media access keys.

• Movie Creation—Capture or synthesize data and create your own movies; use the sequence grabber, media-specific sequence grabber channel components (such as text), and video digitizers.

• QuickTime Import and Export—Bring existing media into QuickTime from dozens of other formats, export movies, tracks, or images to various non-QuickTime formats and file types.

• Compression and Decompression—Set up and work directly with image and sound compressors and decompressors, data codecs, and image transcoders.

• Video Effects and Transitions—Work with QuickTime filters, wipe and fade transitions, and other effects.

• Media Types and Media Handlers—Work directly with media handlers for video, sound, text, timecode, and more, including tween components.

• Wired Movies and Sprites—Animate sprites programmatically, add interactive controls and wired actions to movies, make movies that interact with remote servers.

• Virtual Reality—Work with QuickTime VR panoramas and cubes, set up hotspots, control cursors, add interactive features.

• Music and Audio—Work with digital sound at a low level, or use the QuickTime Music Architecture to synthesize music.

• Transport and Delivery—Use data handler components and video output components to get movies and media from special data sources (such as databases) or to send video to output devices other than screens.

• Writing Components—Extend QuickTime by writing your own components for new media types, compression schemes, data sources, output devices, clock sources, and more.

The main QuickTime documentation page contains links to all these areas. Clicking a link brings up a list of documents in that area; you can sort the documents by date, title, or topic. The areas are listed alphabetically.

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