Discovering QuickTime 3.0: For Windows, Macintosh and Java - Softcover

George Towner

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0120596407 ISBN 13: 9780120596409

Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers In, 1999

Synopsis

Written for programmers, multimedia designers, and everyone interested in the latest media technology, this book gives you a step-by-step introduction to QuickTime programming, from movies and animation to streaming video on the Internet. The CD-ROM in the back provides working applications, sample code, and the essential programming resources you need to get started. QuickTime sets the standard for worldwide distribution of multimedia content. An increasing number of Windows and Macintosh application developers use its extensive toolkit to bring time and action to their programs. If you're going to compete in today's multimedia world, you need to understand QuickTime. What can QuickTime do for you? QuickTime is a complete system for working with all aspects of digital media. With QuickTime, you can: ; Build, play, and edit movies on both Windows and Macintosh computers.; Fill your movies with a wide range of video, audio, graphic, and animation data, using most popular formats and compression standards.; Create Windows and Macintosh movie files that you can stream over the Internet or deliver on CD-ROM ; Make animated graphics with interactive capabilities.; Compose and play synthetic sounds and music, using QuickTime's built-in MIDI synthesizer.; Create virtual reality environments and 3D interactive models. This book shows you how to harness the power of QuickTime. It doesn't take weeks of work to achieve sophisticated multimedia effects; fewer than a dozen lines of Java or C can bring the power of QuickTime into your application.

About this title

Review

If you're programming multimedia applications in QuickTime, the many thousands of pages of technical documentation in the QuickTime SDK have all the technical information you need but not much in the way of general introduction. That's where Discovering QuickTime starts, with an overview of QuickTime's component architecture and how you program with it.

The first half of the book gets you started writing code for QuickTime movies with video, sound, animations and music. There are plenty of code snippets (and sample code for Mac and Windows is on the accompanying CD-ROM). For more technical detail, turn to the larger section on programming techniques, which walks you through more complex code for working with sprites, synthesising music and adding virtual reality features to movies.

QuickTime provides its various features by calling just the components it needs. The Windows version of QuickTime has all the same features as the Mac software, but the QuickTime components interact with the Windows OS slightly differently and all the cross-platform issues are covered as clearly as everything else in the book.

Don't look to a book written by a member of the QuickTime development team for an independent assessment of the strengths or weaknesses of QuickTime: Discovering QuickTime is relentlessly positive about Apple's multimedia system. It's also clear, friendly and thorough; if you want to start programming with QuickTime, this is a good introduction. --Penny Jannifer

About the Author

By George Towner and Apple Computer, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers In
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0120596407
• ISBN 13: 9780120596409
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 515