Introduction to QuickTime 7

QuickTime is the industry standard for multimedia programming and application development, with a rich and evolving API comprised of more than 2500 function calls. Its component-based architecture is highly extensible, enabling applications to display, import, export, modify, and capture a broad range of digital media, including audio, video, still images, text, Flash, MIDI, sprites, VR panoramas, among other media types. QuickTime is designed from the ground up to work with local disk-based media, media accessed over a network, or streams of real-time data.

This document provides detailed information about the new features, changes, and enhanced capabilities that are available in QuickTime 7 for Mac OS X version 10.4.

Who Needs To Read This Document

If you are a QuickTime API-level developer, content author, multimedia producer, or Webmaster who is currently working with QuickTime, you should read this document.

The document is written both for developers who use QuickTime on the Mac OS X platform and want to learn the new programming features of QuickTime 7, and for beginning or experienced Cocoa programmers interested in using QuickTime in their application development.

How This Document Is Organized

This update guide is intended to provide QuickTime developers, as well as other developers new to the platform, with a comprehensive description of the changes and enhancements in this major software release. Beyond this brief introductory chapter, the material discussed in Chapter 2 of the guide points to and cross-references in Chapter 3 the many new functions available in QuickTime 7, with an emphasis on understanding their usage for application developers.

See Also

For developers who want to take advantage of QuickTime features and functionality, the complete suite of documentation that describes the QuickTime API is available online in HTML and PDF at the QuickTime Reference Library website.

The reference information currently presented in Chapter 3 of this update guide is also available in the QuickTime API Reference document. All of the new QuickTime functions, data structures, and callbacks in QuickTime 7 are incorporated into the QuickTime API Reference for easy access and reference, either in HTML or PDF formats.

If you are new to QuickTime, you should begin by referring to Getting Started With QuickTime, which describes the various starting points and learning paths for working with this rich, multimedia API.

Updates to the QuickTime technical documentation website are provided on a regular basis. Developers can also subscribe to various mailing lists for the latest news and information.

To sign up for any of Apple’s Developer Programs, go to: http://developer.apple.com/membership/index.html.