QuickTime Kit Programming Guide - filibeto.org

C H A P T E R 1
The QuickTime Kit API
A QuickTime movie consists of one or more tracks, each of which is associated with a single media.
Similarly, a QTMovie is associated with one or more objects of type QTTrack, each of which is
associated with a single QTMedia object. The QTTrack and QTMedia classes provide a number of
methods for operating on QuickTime tracks and media.
The QTDataReference class represents a data reference, which is QuickTime’s standard way of picking
out movie data, whether stored in files, URLs, memory blocks, or elsewhere.
The QuickTime Kit also defines the QTTime and QTTimeRange structures for representing specific
times and time ranges in a movie or track.
QTMovie
The QTMovie class represents a QuickTime movie, which is a collection of playable and editable
media content. A movie describes the sources and types of the media in that collection and their
spatial and temporal organization. These collections may be used for presentation (such as playback
on the screen) or for the organization of media for processing (such as composition and transcoding
to a different compression type).
Just as a QuickTime movie contains a set of tracks, each of which defines the type, the segments, and
the ordering of the media data it presents, a QTMovie object is associated with instances of the QTTrack
class. In turn, a QTTrack object is associated with a single QTMedia object.
A QTMovie object can be initialized from a file, from a resource specified by a URL, from a block of
memory, from a pasteboard, or from an existing QuickTime movie.
Once a QTMovie object has been initialized, it is used in combination with a QTMovieView for
playback.
The QTMovie class includes an extensive number of instance and class methods that let you perform
a wide range of operations on QuickTime movies. Some of these capabilities include:
■ Creating and initializing a QTMovie object
■ Getting a list of supported file types
■ Setting movie properties and attributes
■ Getting and setting selection times
■ Getting movie tracks and movie images
■ Storing movie data
■ Controlling movie playback
■ Editing and saving a movie
■ Getting QTMovie primitives—that is, getting the movie or movie controller associated with a
QTMovie object
The QTMovie class also includes a large number of constants you can use to specify movie attributes.
The QuickTime Kit Classes 13
2005-11-09 | © 2004, 2005 Apple Computer, Inc. All Rights Reserved.