Introduction to QuickTime Import and Export Guide

This book describes QuickTime’s technology for importing and exporting graphics and other data into and out of movies.

QuickTime imports and exports data between movies and still images using graphic importer and exporter components and movie data exchange components:

Image importers and exporters manage the import and export of graphic images, such as JPEG, TIFF, Photoshop, and PNG. Movie data exchange components support the import and export of other multimedia formats, such as AIFF, WAVE, AVI, MPEG-1, MIDI, MPEG-4, 3GPP, MP3, MPEG-2, H.263, H.264, and OpenDML. QuickTime can open any format file for which it has an importer and create any for which it has an exporter.

Applications make direct calls to graphic importer components, so this document will be of interest to most QuickTime developers who work with still images or the web. To obtain the services of a graphics importer component, applications normally use the GetGraphicsImporterForFile or GetGraphicsImporterForDataRef functions of the Image Compression Manager.

If your application needs to import or export data between movies and other data types, you should read the sections Movie Data Exchange Components, and Using Movie Data Exchange Components. If you plan to control data exchange components directly from within your application, or if you are creating a new movie data exchange component, you will need to read all of the material in this document.

If you need to create a new graphics importer component, refer to this document to implement a component that supports the required interface functions.

Organization of This Document

This document is divided into seven chapters:

See Also

Sample code is available at:

http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/ImproveYourImage/index.html

The sample code demonstrates the usage of QuickTime graphics importers and exporters, and includes twelve separate examples, each of which can be chosen from the Examples menu. These show how to use graphics importers to

The following Apple books cover related aspects of QuickTime programming: