QuickTime - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 392

makes use of the QuickTime live-warping and morphing capabilities that transform the
movie while it is playing. Demonstrations from the 1990s showed QuickTime movies
being played back as a texture map on various topographic shapes. The most extreme was
a movie projected onto a doughnut shape, and rotating cubes were also used to show off
this capability.
Creating an environment and mapping the video onto the surfaces of that environ-
ment is clearly technically achievable and was shown at several developer conferences in
the mid to late 1990s. The implementation was technically challenging, and not very many
developers used the technique. This kind of presentation is likely to become popular
again, since the improvements to Mac OS 10.4 provide an OpenGL-based canvas onto
which QuickTime projects its movies. The improvement in computing power and tools for
authoring will also facilitate its wider use.

23.15 QuickTime Utilities

There are many tools available for manipulating QuickTime movie content. A collection of
utilities is provided for download at the Apple QuickTime web site. See Table 23-2 for a
summary list.

23.16 Cross-Platform Portability

The major caveat here is that you can only use QuickTime on Macintosh and Windows
systems and naturally it works at its best and smoothest on the Macintosh. Nevertheless,
it is quite popular on the Windows platform.
There is currently no Linux version available. When Apple QuickTime management
was questioned about that at a developer conference in 2003, the indication was that there
could never be a Linux version for commercial reasons.
It may be possible to play QuickTime movies inside something like M-Player, which
hosts the QuickTime dynamic link libraries (DLLs) in such a way that they think they are
running in Windows. This is a clever technique for porting binary code from Windows to
Linux. The DLLs provide a library of code that supports the QuickTime functionality.
Because they are available as a library, you have only a single copy in memory and it is
shared by all applications that are playing a QuickTime movie. Getting these DLLs to
work in Linux with a PC simulation tool will likely stay the only way to get QuickTime
support on that platform unless Apple decides to port QuickTime there themselves.
If you choose to use QuickTime on Linux, your decision is probably based on a desire
to build your workflow around a UNIX-based environment. But because Mac OS X is
UNIX based, putting QuickTime onto Linux would not gain you very much from a

QuickTime utilities: http://developer.apple.com/quicktime/quicktimeintro/tools/
M-Player: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/