This chapter describes the file format used for QuickTime VR movies. In particular, it describes the format of the atom containers and associated atoms for a QuickTime VR movie, as well as the format of the video tracks in a QuickTime VR movie.
There are two main reasons you might need to read this chapter. First, you need to know about the format of QuickTime VR files if you want to create QuickTime VR movies without the assistance of movie-authoring software, or if you want to develop some QuickTime VR movie-authoring software itself. Second, you need to know about the format of QuickTime VR files if you want to extract information from a QuickTime VR file that cannot be obtained using QuickTime VR Manager functions. For instance, there is no QuickTime VR Manager function that returns the name of a given node; however, you can easily get a node's name by reading the information in the atoms in the atom container returned by the QTVRGetNodeInfo function.
In general, you don't need to know about the format of atoms or atom containers simply to use the functions provided by the QuickTime VR Manager.
If you want to create QuickTime VR movies, you should already be familiar with QuickTime, as described in Inside Macintosh: QuickTime. You should be especially familiar with the sections of that book that describe how to create movies and how to work with media samples. If you want to directly access the movie data stored in an atom container, you also need to be familiar with the atom routines introduced in QuickTime version 2.1. See Developer's Guide: QuickTime for Macintosh, Version 2.5 for complete details on creating and managing the atoms that make up a movie file.
To use this chapter, you also need to be familiar with QuickTime VR. See handlink "About QuickTime VR" for the necessary information.
This chapter begins by briefly describing the QuickTime VR file format. Then it provides some sample code that shows how to read information from the atoms in a QuickTime VR movie file. The section "QuickTime VR File Format Reference" , provides a complete reference to the constants and data structures that define the QuickTime VR file format. (These constants and data structures are contained in the header file QuickTimeVRFormat.h .)
This chapter describes the file format supported by version 2.0 and later of the QuickTime VR Manager. For information on the file format supported by earlier versions of QuickTime VR, see Macintosh Technical Notes numbers 1035 and 1036 (available electronically on the Developer CD Series ).
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