Article Preview
Buy Now
COLUMN
How to be a Track Star!
Working with QuickTime Tracks in REALbasic
Issue: 1.6 (June/July 2003)
Author: Erick Tejkowski
Author Bio: Erick Tejkowski is the author of REALbasic for Dummies.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 22,094
Starting Page Number: 13
Article Number: 1610
Resource File(s):
1610.zip Updated: 2013-03-11 19:07:56
Related Web Link(s):
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/quicktime/qtdevdocs/APIREF/SOURCESV/programmingsummary.htm
Excerpt of article text...
In my first QuickTime article for
REALbasic Developer , I gave a brief overview of the QuickTime features new to REALbasic 4.5. This time, we will look at how to work with EditableMovies, QTSoundTracks, and QTAudioTracks in REALbasic. You will see how to create movies with audio and/or video. Along the way, we will also examine some of the alternative uses for movies and tracks. The great thing about QuickTime is that you can mold it to meet a variety of needs. For example, in this article, we'll discuss how to build movies with audio and video content, how to mix and match different media formats, how to build a multitrack audio application, how to create time-based movie effects, and even how to display a PDF file with multiple pages. QuickTime is definitely not a one trick pony, so hold on as we wander down this long and winding trail.Background
REALbasic has two classes for working with QuickTime movies: Movie and EditableMovie. Use the Movie class when you want plain vanilla QuickTime movie playback in the MoviePlayer. Should you need to edit any aspect of a QuickTime movie, create your own movie, or use an existing movie file as part of another movie, use the EditableMovie class. Throughout this article, I will use lowercase "movie" to denote a QuickTime movie file or a generic movie (as in "Let's go see a movie!"). Uppercase "Movie" represents the REALbasic Movie class. To help confuse you a little more, the EditableMovie class is a subclass of the Movie class. Thus, all EditableMovies are Movies, but not vice versa. This means that EditableMovies inherit all of the properties and methods of the Movie class.
All QuickTime movies are composed of tracks. Each track holds a particular type of data. There are many types of QuickTime tracks. The two most common types of tracks are audio and video. If you have ever worked with iMovie, you will be familiar with these two track types. What iMovie doesn't tell you, though, is that QuickTime movies can contain any number of tracks. As you will soon see, this fact has all kinds of great programming advantages.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.