QuickTime 3 Documentation
QuickTime allows you to manipulate time-based data such as video sequences, audio sequences, financial results from an ongoing business operation, laboratory data recorded over time, and so on. QuickTime uses the metaphor of a movie to describe time-based data. Therefore, QuickTime stores time-based data in objects called movies.
Just as a cinematic movie can contain several tracks (for example, a video track and a sound track), a single QuickTime movie can contain more than one stream of data. Following the movie metaphor, each of these data streams is called a track . Tracks in QuickTime movies do not actually contain the movie's data. Rather, each track refers to a single media that, in turn, contains references to the actual media data. The media data may be stored on disks, CD-ROM volumes, videotape, or other appropriate storage devices.
Underlying all this is the notion of time. The next section describes how time is represented in QuickTime. Following that are sections that discuss how QuickTime movies, tracks, and media structures relate to time and to one another.