Wired Movies and Sprites

Referenced Sprite Images

In QuickTime 4 the sprite track can use images which are external to its movie's media. The images may be located somewhere on the Internet, in a local file, or anywhere else that a QuickTime Data Handler can read them from.

Since images located on a network server may take some time to load (or possibly never show up), referenced images are loaded asynchronously. Sprites not using referenced images will be created and will be active while the referenced images are loading. You may optionally supply a proxy image that will be displayed until the referenced image has been loaded. If you don't supply a proxy image, sprites using the referenced image will be disabled (invisible and not responsive to mouse events) until it is loaded.

Otherwise, referenced images are the same as traditional ones. They are defined in a sprite key frame sample, available until the next key frame sample is loaded, used by a sprite setting its imageIndex property to the images index, and may be shared by multiple sprites.