QuickTime Toolkit Volume Two: Advanced Movie Playback and Media Types (QuickTime Developer Series)
| 2004-06-30 00:00:00 | | 0 | Computer Application
`Buried inside QuickTime are a host of powerful tools for creating, delivering, and playing digital media. The official QuickTime documentation explains 'what' each API function does. But knowing what each function does isn't enough to allow a developer to take full advantage of QuickTime. QuickTime Toolkit fills in the gap?providing plenty of practical examples of 'how' to use QuickTime to perform all kinds of useful tasks. More importantly, [this book] goes beyond 'how' and into 'why' —providing readers with a deeper understanding of QuickTime and how to benefit from using it in their own products.` ?Peter Hoddie, cofounder of Kinoma and former QuickTime architect
QuickTime Toolkit, Volume Two continues the step-by-step investigation of programming QuickTime, the elegant and powerful media engine used by many of Apple's industry-leading services and products (such as the iTunes music store, iMovie, and Final Cut Pro) and also used by a large number of third-party applications. This second collection of articles from the author's highly regarded column in MacTech Magazine builds upon the discussion of playback techniques and media types presented in the first volume to cover advanced types of QuickTime media data, including video effects, Flash tracks, and skins. It shows how to capture audio and video data, broadcast that data to remote computers, play movies full screen, and load movies asynchronously. QuickTime Toolkit Volume Two also shows how to integrate Carbon events into your Macintosh application and how to work with Macintosh resources in your Windows application.
Part of the official QuickTime Developer Series, publishing the finest books on QuickTime in cooperation with Apple.
*Includes a CD-ROM with numerous code examples in C to help you get started with your own applications
*Written by one of Apple's premier media engineers skilled in revealing QuickTime's sophisticated technology to programmers
*Offers many undocumented insider tips for making applications that work well in both Mac OS and Windows
User review
On the subject of milking a dead cow
This book is insanely expensive considering the fact that much of its content is a decade old. There's not much in it that isn't fairly well covered in the free documentation these days, but there are a lot of things in the free documentation that aren't covered here at all, so why bother? Sure, it's great to wax nostalgic about the time when MacTech was a relatively relevant industry rag and everybody shelled out money for copies of the Think-C Reference Library, but things change quickly in the world of computers, and this thing is an absolute dinosaur.
User review
In depth treatment of advanced Quicktime programming topics
This book, as well as volume one of the set, grew out of a series of articles published in MacTech magazine. This book continues the investigation of QuickTime application programming in C that started in the first volume of this two volume set. This book considers a handful of the more advanced media types supported by QuickTime including video effects, skins, Flash, and Quicktime VR. It also shows how to capture movies from separate sound and video input sources, broadcast movies to the Internet, play movies full screen, and load movies asynchronously. It demonstrates how to attach wired actions to Flash and QuickTime VR movies. The book concludes by updating the Mac OS X version of its sample application `QTShell` to support the latest QuickTime and Carbon APIs. It also revisits some topics first covered in volume one, such as data references and how they are connectd with media sample references. However, you should have access to volume one or be familiar with its contents to really understand what is going on in this volume. The author sprinkles code samples of what he is trying to accomplish throughout the book, making it an outstanding reference for the Quicktime programmer. Highly recommended.