What's New in QuickTime 5
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QuickTime Player normally 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, and VR movies having the VR 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.
Until now, however, QuickTime Player always displayed your movie in a rectangular display area surrounded by a frame of some kind, with the frame providing a draggable area for the viewer to relocate the movie on the desktop.
In QuickTime 5, you can customize the appearance of QuickTime Player by adding a media skin to your movie. A media skin specifies the size and shape of the window that the movie is displayed in. 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 8 .
Figure 8 A QuickTime movie with custom frame and wired sprite controls
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 5, your movie appears in a curved window, as shown in Figure 9 , with the areas that you have specified acting as a draggable frame, as if you had created a custom movie player application.
Figure 9 A skinned movie in QuickTime 5, which appears as if you had created a custom movie player application
Note that you don't need to assign the None Controller to a movie with a media skin (although you can). If the VR Controller or 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 plugin 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.
What's New in QuickTime 5
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