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Wired Movies and Sprites

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Introduction to Wired Movies, Sprites, and the Sprite Toolbox

This chapter provides you with a general introduction to QuickTime wired movies, sprites, and the sprite toolbox. It also discusses some of the new wired movie features added to QuickTime 4.

If you are a content author or tool developer, you'll want to read this chapter to grasp the fundamentals of how wired movies, sprites, and the sprite toolbox work together in the QuickTime software architecture.

Wired movies were originally introduced in QuickTime 3 and have been enhanced in QuickTime 4. These interactive movies can be played in any Web browser using the QuickTime plug-in, and in all applications as long as they use the QuickTime movie controller API.

This chapter is divided into the following major sections:

• "Introduction to Wired Movies" introduces QuickTime events, actions, targets, parameters, expressions, operands, and operators.
• "Introduction to Sprite Animation and the Sprite Toolbox" introduces you to the fundamentals of sprite animation and the sprite toolbox.
• "Defining QuickTime Atoms and Atom Containers" discusses QuickTime atoms, which QuickTime uses to store most of its data using specialized structures in memory. Movies themselves are atoms, as are tracks, media, and data samples. An understanding of atoms is important in working with wired movies, sprites and sprite animation.