Technical Q&A's

QTMRF 01 - QuickTime on UNIX (1-May-95)

Q We have made a lot of ISO9660 CD- ROMs that contain scanned charts compressed with the QuickTime graphics compressor in 256 colors using the system color table. Originally, this project was not intended to be multi- platform, but this has changed, and we have to make these CD-ROMs run on many platforms, including the Mac, Windows, and Unix (SUN, IBM, Silicon Graphics, etc). As far as we know, QuickTime is not ported to all these systems. One way we could make this project portable would be to write our own decompressor, which may not be difficult. However, we need to know if the binary format of data compressed by CompressImage() is public.

A You need to get a licensing agreement with Apple before you can receive full disclosure of the compressor format, and possibly source code.

The documentation available is mostly based on the file format of the QuickTime movies, which is documented in Inside Macintosh: QuickTime in Appendix A. There is also a UNIX Quicktime kit available from APDA, which includes code to enable playback on various platforms. However, this code has not been revised for some time, and it is not guaranteed to produce a playback environment that works with the features of QuickTime 2.0

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