Wired Movies and Sprites

External Movie Targets for Wired Actions in QuickTime 4

QuickTime 4 allows your application to target external movies in addition to tracks and objects within tracks, such as sprites and QuickDraw 3D nodes.

In QuickTime 4 wired actions may be performed on an element of another movie. For example, you can create a movie which acts as a custom Movie Controller, setting the rate and volume of one or more separate movies on the same Web page. Or you could create two co-operative, talking head movies that have a conversation, each waiting for the other to finish before speaking their next piece. Because each movie has its own independent time base, you can achieve results that are impossible if you used a single wired movie that uses this mechanism.

External movies may be referred to either by name or by ID. There is a standard way to tag a movie with name and ID properties.

Since a QuickTime movie has no knowledge of what other QuickTime movies are currently open, the software that is playing the movies works with a Movie Controller in order to resolve the external movie names or IDs to actual movie references. The versions of the QuickTime plug-in and QuickTime Player released with QuickTime 4 both support external movie targets. Using the QuickTime plug-in, the movies should all be on the same Web page. Using the Movie Player, they should all be open movie documents.

For more information about authoring movies with external targets, refer to "New Authoring Features in QuickTime 4" (page 71) .