QuickTime For Windows Programmers

What Is QuickTime For Windows?

Originally developed for the Mac OS platform, QuickTime is now available to developers for the 32-bit Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 platforms as well, via the QuickTime 3 Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows.

If you are a Windows developer, the SDK allows you to incorporate QuickTime capabilities into your applications developed directly for the Windows platform. If you are a Macintosh developer, the SDK provides you with the tools you need to port the QuickTime-based functionality of your application to Windows.

The core of the QuickTime 3 SDK for Windows is a Windows dynamic link library (DLL) that implements the behavior of QuickTime and a few Macintosh Toolbox routines on the Windows platform. The Macintosh Toolbox routines it supports are listed and described in Mac OS for QuickTime Programmers.

This DLL is intended only for QuickTime cross-platform support, not as a general tool for porting Macintosh code to Windows. For a complete list of QuickTime and Mac OS functions supported for Windows code, see the functions index in the QuickTime 3 online documentation.

Because the QuickTime routines were originally designed for the Mac OS, they operate on Mac OS data structures and assume certain features of the Mac OS operating environment. For example, QuickTime routines are driven by Mac OS-style events rather than Windows-style messages, and do their drawing in a Mac OS graphics port instead of a Windows device context. To use them in the Windows environment, you have to do a little extra work to mediate between the two platforms.

The purpose of this manual is to help you through that process. If your primary development background is on Windows, the book will introduce you to some of the basic Mac OS concepts that you'll need to understand in order to use QuickTime effectively. There are just a few of these, and they correspond pretty closely to ideas that you're already familiar with from Windows programming. Table 1 lists these basic QTML concepts and their Windows counterparts.

Table 1 Windows and QTML concepts compared

Windows concept	QTML equivalent
Message (`MSG` )	Event ( `EventRecord` )
Graphics Device Interface (GDI)	QuickDraw
Device context ( `DC` )	Graphics port ( `CGrafPort` )
Window handle (`HWND` )	Window pointer ( `CWindowPtr` )
Common Dialog Box Library	Standard File Package

Please note, though, that this manual does not attempt to teach you all there is to know about QuickTime itself. That information is presented in the following books, all of which are included in both online and Adobe Acrobat (PDF) form with the QuickTime 3 Software Development Kit:

Inside Macintosh: QuickTime
Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Components
QuickTime 3 Reference
Programming With QuickTime Sprites
QuickTime Music Architecture
Mac OS For QuickTime Programmers
Mac OS Sound
Programming With QiuickTime VR 2.1
3D Graphics Programming With QuickDraw 3D 1.5.4

The goal here is simply to show how QuickTime fits into the structure of a typical Windows application and to provide Windows developers with the minimum conceptual foundation needed to read and understand the existing QuickTime documentation.

With those objectives in mind, the programming examples in this book have deliberately been kept simple and straightforward. The code samples are limited to the most basic QuickTime functionality: presenting a movie and allowing the user to manipulate and control its presentation through a standard QuickTime movie controller. Once you've seen how to do that much, you can consult the Inside Macintosh volumes and the QuickTime 3 Reference to learn how to accomplish more advanced operations such as creating and editing movies or developing new QuickTime components.

When you have mastered the basics of QuickTime programming, the other books listed above will help you explore the worlds of sprites, music and sound, virtual reality environments, and 3D graphics modeling, all of which are part of QuickTime for Windows.