Apple MacOS Quicktime

Index: Requirements Problems Companies Platforms Languages Software Research

Future Multiplatform Parity Release
- http://www.zdnet.com/macweek/mw_1010/news_quicktime_shift.html
- Quicktime from the same source code for multiple platforms
- MacOS, Windows 95, Windows NT
- later OS/2, SGI, other Unix platforms
- Promised summer 1996
Competes with Video for Windows and the newer Active Movie, both from Microsoft.
QuickTime VR competes with Warp, which is more general and faster.
Currently runs on MacOS
- Uses the Component Manager
Currently runs on Windows 95
- Does Quicktime for Windows support authoring?
- Will it be kept up to date?
- Compatibility between quicktime 2.0 & quicktime for windows
  - http://dev.info.apple.com/techqa/qtw/qtw16.html
  - Quicktime 2.0 codecs are present in quicktime 2.0.x.
  - Discuss external codecs with video hardware manufacturers.
  - Supports sound, video, text, music (midi), and mpeg tracks on windows and mac. Only one of each track open under windows, except for the number of sound tracks. With Quicktime for Windows 2.0.1 you can enable/disable a multitude of sound tracks.
- Biggest difference between these versions is the API access under Quicktime for windows 2.0.
- It doesn't yet support all the api calls we have under windows.
- Nearly all of the movie controller api's are supported, as well as many of the basic calls, but the calls to create .sarc and further manipulate movie tracks are missing.
- You can't create specific media handlers with Quicktime for Windows 2.0, but you can write data handlers and codecs for the Windows environment.
- Drawback for qtw is keeping track of all the possible configuration issues that end users might encoutner.
- Quicktime for Windows 2.0.3 README
  - Supports text tracks, mpeg tracks and file playback via sigma designs reel magic board, mpeg decompressor components, midi music tracks, ima4 compressed audio, video hardware frame buffer access components, p9000 graphics accelerator, cirus logic cl-gd54xx gui accel, wd 90c33 graphics accel, ole 1.0, copy selected text track and current visuals to clipboard, mci integration, custom add-in decompressors, such as intel's indeo.
- Mac features that are not currently implemented include capture, compression, PhotoCD, SMPTE time codes, data references.
- "Note: when producing QuickTime movies, you are encouraged to use advanced features on the Macintosh release of QuickTime. It is likely that features currently unique to the Macintosh will be supported in subsequent releases of QuickTime for Windows."
- QuickTime for Windows API & Overlaying sound effects
  - http://dev.info.apple.com/techqa/qtw/qtw19.html
  - Although QuickTime for Windows 2.0.1 supports multiple sound tracks, it allows only one track to be active at a time, because Windows 3.1 does not support mixing of sound tracks. The InsertTrackSegment, DeleteTrackSegment, and InsertEmptyTrackSegment calls are not included in the QuickTime for Windows 2.0.1 API.
- QuickTime for Windows does not currently support WinG or the DCI model
- Mixing sounds over QuickTime movies
  - There's no provision for extracting the sound resouce from a QuickTime movie under QTW. You may have to store the sound resources outside the QuickTime movie format, and mix these with WaveMix (a Microsoft library).
- Quicktime VR for Windows
  - I could not get it to work...
QuickTime will eventually run on Unix
The new version of QuickTime for Windows will support DirectDraw, according to rumor.