Technical Q&A QA1164

Disabling QuickTime Error Dialogs When Opening or Tasking a Movie

Q: I've written a "server" component that uses the Quicktime APIs. When I encounter certain error conditions (such as when the ConvertMovieToFile function fails) an error dialog is displayed which blocks the process. Is there any way to disable this feature?

A: Starting with QuickTime 6, you can pass the flag newMovieDontInteractWithUser to the various NewMovie... API variants (NewMovieFromFile , NewMovieFromDataRef , etc.) to disable dialogs that may be presented when opening or tasking a movie. Using this same flag with earlier versions of QuickTime is allowed but it will have no effect.

The newMovieDontInteractWithUser flag can be found in the Movies.h interface file and is defined as follows:

    enum {
        newMovieDontInteractWithUser = 1L << 11
    };

When using ConvertMovieToFile , simply add the newMovieDontInteractWithUser flag in addition to the other flags you're currently using, such as newMovieActive and so on.

[Mar 20, 2003]