QuickTime 3 Documentation
The core of the QuickTime 3 SDK for Windows is the QuickTime Media Layer, or QTML, a Windows dynamic link library (DLL) that implements the behavior of QuickTime and other Macintosh Toolbox routines on the Windows platform. QTML functions as a compatibility layer, allowing you to use these routines in the same way from your Windows application as you would on the Macintosh. This facilitates the task of porting an existing Mac OS QuickTime application to Windows, or of building the same application for both platforms from substantially the same code base.
Because the QuickTime routines were originally designed for the Mac OS, however, 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 2 lists these basic QTML concepts and their Windows counterparts.
Table 2 Windows and QTML concepts compared
Please note, though, that this manual does not attempt to teach you all there is to know about QuickTime itself. That information is already available in two volumes of the Inside Macintosh series: QuickTime and QuickTime Components and in the QuickTime 3 Reference.
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 on QuickTime, as well as the QuickTime 3 Reference. to learn how to accomplish more advanced operations such as creating and editing movies or developing new QuickTime components.