QuickTime 3 Documentation
QuickTime comprises two managers: the Movie Toolbox and the Image Compression Manager. QuickTime also relies on the Component Manager, as well as a set of predefined components. Figure 0-1 shows the relationships of these managers and an application that is playing a movie.
Figure 0-4 QuickTime playing a movie
The following sections discuss these managers in more detail.
Your application gains access to the capabilities of QuickTime by calling functions in the Movie Toolbox. The Movie Toolbox allows you to store, retrieve, and manipulate time-based data that is stored in QuickTime movies. A single movie may contain several types of data. For example, a movie that contains video information might include both video data and the sound data that accompanies the video.
The Movie Toolbox also provides functions for editing movies. For example, there are editing functions for shortening a movie by removing portions of the video and sound tracks, and there are functions for extending it with the addition of new data from other QuickTime movies.
The Image Compression Manager comprises a set of functions that compress and decompress images or sequences of graphic images.
The Image Compression Manager provides a device-independent and driver-independent means of compressing and decompressing images and sequences of images. It also contains a simple interface for implementing software and hardware image-compression algorithms. It provides system integration functions for storing compressed images as part of PICT files, and it offers the ability to automatically decompress compressed PICT files on any QuickTime-capable Macintosh computer.
In most cases, applications use the Image Compression Manager indirectly, by calling Movie Toolbox functions or by displaying a compressed picture. However, if your application compresses images or makes movies with compressed images, you will call Image Compression Manager functions.
The Image Compression Manager is described in the chapter "Image Compression Manager" later in this book. This chapter also includes code samples that show how to compress images or make movies with compressed images.