QuickTime Streaming

Compositing Streaming and Non-Streaming Tracks

A client movie can contain non-streaming tracks with locally-stored media, in addition to one or more streaming tracks. Use this technique to add a live stream to a locally-stored movie, or to distribute a movie on CD-ROM that references the latest version of some media stored on a server.

You can composite a streaming track with local tracks. A streaming track can be positioned in time and space like any other track. Bear in mind that the streaming track may contain more than one video, audio, text, or other streams, however.

If your application creates movies, you will want to provide options for creating a server movie and a client movie from the same data, as well as providing options for putting some tracks in the server movie and some in the client movie.

Ordinarily, you create a streaming movie by exporting a movie to a hinted movie, putting that hinted movie on an RTP server, and creating a client movie that contains the URL of the movie on the server.

Sometimes, however, you will want to export part of an existing movie to a hinted server movie while incorporating other parts in the client movie. You might do this to stream the audio and video parts of a movie over RTP, while streaming wired sprites or chapter lists over HTTP.

For example, to create a streaming movie with a chapter list, extract the text track containing the chapter list from the movie and export the remainder as a hinted movie. Create a client movie with just a streaming track containing the URL of the hinted movie. Add the extracted text track to the client movie and make it a chapter list by adding a track reference to the streaming track. The client movie now contains:

a local text track containing the chapter list
a streaming track that points to the rest of the movie
a track reference of type 'chap' in the streaming track that references the chapter list track

Streaming Movie with a Chapter List

The server movie contains the original movie, minus the chapter list, plus hint tracks.

You would use a similar technique to stream a movie with QuickTime video effects, storing the effects tracks in the client movie and applying the track references to the streaming tracks that act as sources to the effects.

To sum up:

A client movie can contain tracks with locally-stored media as well as streaming tracks.
Streaming tracks can be composited with local media tracks, bearing in mind that one streaming track can contain multiple streams. The compositing is done in the client movie.
Tracks that cannot be streamed over RTP can be incorporated into client movies and streamed over HTTP.