Customer Reviews

QuickTime Toolkit Volume One: Basic Movie Playback and Media Types (QuickTime Developer Series)

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Tim Monroe's column in MacTech is as much a final word on QuickTime as Apple's developer docs. This book is the de facto official guide to native development with QuickTime and given the size of the QT API, you'd be hard pressed to know where to begin without it. Tim starts with a basic "shell" application that compiles and runs on Mac and Windows -- yes, Windows developers are very much part of the target audience -- and covers the basics of playing, editing, saving and exporting movies, then moves into tricky stuff like sprites (which takes four chapters), VR, and effects.

For C-language developers, this and its volume 2 companion are the books you want. I wrote a book on QuickTime for Java (QTJ being just a wrapper around the C calls), and I wish this book had been out before I started, because it would have saved me a lot of research time figuring out what my code was calling and why it worked the way it did. In fact, those who've mastered QTJ can probably read this book and do a mental "port" from C to Java to figure out material I didn't cover.

Recommended? Hell, if you're in the QT space, this is *required* reading.

I returned it. I was not alerted to the fact that this is designed for a sophisticated software engineer, not just a hobbyist like me.

This book is the first of a two volume set on QuickTime programming on both Mac and Windows machines. This first volume is more concerned with the basics of controlling multimedia through a C program that uses the QuickTime API. You'll learn how to open, play, edit, and save a movie file. Besides just video you also learn how to use the Quicktime interface to work with images, text, timecode, and sprites. Fundamental Quicktime concepts are all introduced in this first volume. The author does all this by creating an application entitled "QTShell" that he adds to as he gradually explains each concept. This same application is used in volume two also. The author assumes the reader already knows his/her computing platform and OS, what QuickTime is, and how to program in C. This frees him to concentrate on the Hows of Quicktime programming. Both volumes of this programming guide began as a series of magazine articles, thus the style is quite accessible - it is not a terse academic style tome at all.