QuickTime - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 384

When people talk about a QuickTime video codec, they are describing one of the
Sorensen codecs that is supplied as a part of QuickTime. A QuickTime movie file might
contain any one or more of a large variety of video formats. Other kinds of media might
also be present in the file.
Over and above normal linear playback, QuickTime supports the following addi-
tional capabilities that are not found in the other players:

Massively parallel numbers of tracks

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A wide variety of non-video/audio track content types

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Internal object base

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Real-time effects layers

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Real-time warping and transforms

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Object movies in QuickTime VR

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Scene/panorama movies in QuickTime VR

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Embedded movies within movies

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Wired script control

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Sprites

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QuickTime Music architecture

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Image conversion and translation

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Multimedia data codecs

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Most of these capabilities have been available in QuickTime since about 1998.
Interestingly, a lot of these capabilities have now become available in MPEG-4, and
that sets MPEG-4 apart from MPEG-2 in a very important way. Creating packaged inter-
active multimedia experiences that play across multiple platforms is possible and is now
available in an open-standards format. So if you are already able to create a nonlinear
experience in QuickTime, you should be able to translate that content quite easily.
QuickTime also has a valuable toolkit of image conversion and compression tools as
well as multimedia data converters.

23.3 The Player

When you use the QuickTime player, it looks the same on Windows and Mac OS. The
release strategy ensures that the same version is supported everywhere and the upgrades
are synchronized as closely as possible so that the viewing experience and API support are
consistent.
Figure 23-1 shows the QuickTime 6 movie player in the default state. The QuickTime
7 movie player looks slightly different in appearance.

23.4 The QuickTime Applications Programming Interface

The QuickTime player is available as an applications programming interface (API) that
you can invoke from within your own application. You are responsible for setting up the