What's New in QuickTime 5

Communicating Directly with the Component

If you don't want to present the user with the flattener's dialog box, you can communicate directly with the component by using the MovieExportSetSettingsFromAtomContainer routine as described next.

If you want to specify a preview image other than the default, you need to create a special atom container and then call MovieExportSetSettingsFromAtomContainer before calling MovieExportToFile . You can specify how to compress the image, what resolution to use, and you can even specify your own preview image file to be used. The atom container you pass in can have various atoms that specify certain export options. These atoms must all be children of a flattener settings parent atom.

The preview resolution atom is a 16-bit, big-endian value that allows you to specify the resolution of the preview image. This value, which defaults to kQTVRQuarterRes , indicates how much to reduce the preview image.

The blur preview atom is a Boolean value that indicates whether to blur the image before compressing. Blurring usually results in a much more highly compressed image. The default value is true .

The create preview atom is a Boolean value that indicates whether a preview image should be created. The default value is true .

The import preview atom is a Boolean value that is used to indicate that the preview image should be imported from an external file rather than generated from the image in the panorama file itself. This allows you to have any image you want as the preview for the panorama. You can specify which file to use by also including the import specification atom, which is an FSSpec data structure that identifies the image file. If you do not include this atom, then the flattener presents the user with a dialog box asking the user to select a file. The default for import preview is false. If an import file is used, the image is used at its natural size and the resolution setting is ignored.

What's New in QuickTime 5