Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Components
Movie controller components provide movie playback and editing capabilities to applications. In so doing, movie controller components remove from your application much of the burden of presenting an interface for movie playback and editing. It is possible to have the controller do nearly all the work involved with playing movies, including updating and idling. Alternatively, your application can take care of some or all of these tasks.
You can think of movie controller components in terms of more familiar Macintosh controls. Movie controller components, in addition to handling update, activate, and mouse-down events, also know how to interact with the data that they control. Consequently, the movie controller components can actually perform the commands requested by users (the controls handled by the Control Manager merely report user actions to your application). In this way, your application is relieved of much of the work of controlling movies. Furthermore, movie controller components can be updated to provide improved functionality with no impact on your application.
Movie controller components have a component type value of 'play' . You can use the following constant to specify this value.
#define MovieControllerComponentType 'play'
Apple has defined the functional interface that is supported by movie controller components so that you can create a wide variety of movie controls. For example, you could create a control that is separate from the movie image. Consequently, the interface is a bit more complex than might seem necessary for simple controls that support only playback. For details on the functions that your component must support, see "Movie Controller Components Reference," which begins on Movie Controller Components Reference .