Inside Macintosh: QuickTime Components
This chapter discusses preview components. Preview components are used by the Image Compression Manager's standard file preview functions to display and create visual previews for files. Previews usually consist of a single image, but they may contain many kinds of data, including sound. In QuickTime, the Image Compression Manager is the primary client of preview components. Rarely, if ever, do applications call preview components directly. However, you may want to develop your own preview component for use by the Image Compression Manager. Therefore, this chapter focuses on what you must do to create a preview component.
Before learning about preview components, you must be familiar with QuickTime movie previews. See the chapter "Movie Toolbox" in Inside Macintosh: QuickTime for a complete description of movie previews and of the Image Compression Manager functions that support standard file previews.