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QuickTime Movie File Format Specification, May 1996

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Movie Atoms

Movie atoms have an atom type of 'moov' . These atoms act as a container for the information that describes a movie's data. This information, or meta-data, is stored in a number of different types of atoms. As such, the movie atom is essentially a container of other atoms. At the highest level, movie atoms contain track atoms, which in turn contain media atoms. At the lowest level you find the leaf atoms, which contain the actual data, usually in the form of a table or a data stream.

For example, the track atom contains the edit atom, which contains a leaf atom called the edit list atom . The edit list atom contains an edit list table. Both of these atoms are discussed later in this book.

Figure 0-5 provides a conceptual view of the organization of a simple, one-track QuickTime movie. Each nested box in the illustration represents an atom that belongs to its containing atom. The figure does not show the data regions of any of the atoms. These areas are described in the sections that follow.

Figure 5 Sample organization of a one-track video movie atom

The Movie Atom

Track Atoms

Media Atoms

Media Information Atoms

Data Information Atoms

Sample Atoms

Using Sample Atoms

User Data Atoms

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