---

Overview

The QuickTime API comprises more than 2500 functions that provide services to applications. These services include audio and video capture and playback, movie editing, composition, and streaming, still image display, audio-visual interactivity, and so on. The API also supports a wide range of standards-based formats. It is dedicated to extending the reach of application developers by letting them invoke the full range of QuickTime capabilities.

The QuickTime API is not static, however. It evolves to adopt new idioms, new data structures, and new ways of doing things––all of which continually make the API more convenient for developers to use in their applications.

This document is written for developers who use QuickTime on the Mac OS X platform and who want to learn about new ways of programming with QuickTime 6.4.

In this section:

QuickTime 6 In Perspective
New Features of QuickTime 6.4
Summary of QuickTime 6 Versions

QuickTime 6 In Perspective

QuickTime 6, introduced in 2002, represented a major advance in Apple technology. Because QuickTime 6 supports ISO-compliant MPEG-4 video and audio, both encode and decode, you can create and play back MPEG-4 video and audio content and use Advanced Audio Coding (AAC).

In subsequent releases of QuickTime 6, additional support was provided for 3GPP authoring, playback, and delivery. These releases also built on Apple’s support of MPEG-4 as the standard for digital media streaming on the Internet and extended it with support for standards for mobile Internet streaming.

New Features of QuickTime 6.4

QuickTime 6.4 now adds significant new functionality to QuickTime. The following new features are discussed in the rest of this document:

• “A New Approach To Data References” describes how you can now manipulate QuickTime media via data references—opening and flattening movies, exporting graphics images, and so on.

• “Threaded Programming and QuickTime” tells how QuickTime 6.4 supports execution of background tasks on multiple threads in a preemptive multitasking environment. This new technology makes it possible to offload many tasks from your program's main thread.

• “New Graphics Functions” explains how you can now use QuickTime to read and write image files while using Core Graphics to draw and manage images.

• “New Graphics Importer Support for ColorSync” introduces new graphics importer functions that provide support for ColorSync on Mac OS X.

• “New AV Startup Synchronization Functions” describes new functions that improve audio-visual startup synchronization.

• “Processing Events” gives some guidelines for handling QuickTime events on the current Mac OS X platform.

• “New Component Properties Functions” provides details of QuickTime’s new Component Properties API, which let you configure QuickTime processes such as export and recompression without using the QuickTime user interface.

• “New Movie Property Functions” describes five movie property functions that are similar in purpose to the component functions described in the previous section.

• “New IIDC Digitizer Functions” introduces new APIs to communicate with video digitizers that have a subtype of vdSubtypeIIDC. These digitizers support new IEEE-1394-based digital cameras and webcams that have Instrumentation and Industrial Control (IIDC) features.

• “New Sound Function” describes a new sound function that identifies the audio device used by a video output component.

• “New Offset TimeBase Functions” lists two offset timebase functions that help custom media handlers implement media latency.

• “Changes to Text Drawing” explains how QuickTime now uses the ATSUI text drawing engine instead of TextEdit.

• “Encoding Text Changes” describes changes to QuickTime’s internal behavior for encoding text.

• “New Release of QuickTime for Java” discusses QuickTime for Java 1.4.1, which provides new Java functionality for both Mac OS X and Windows.

“QuickTime 6.4 API Reference” provides interface details for all the functions, data structures, and callbacks that are new in QuickTime 6.4.

Summary of QuickTime 6 Versions

The following table summarizes the different point releases of QuickTime 6.

---