QuickTime 3 Reference

Getting a List of Effects

Before your application presents the standard parameters dialog box to users, you will probably want to build a list of the effects that are available. QuickTime provides the QTGetEffectsList function to do this for you. This returns a QTAtomContainer that contains a list of all the effects currently available.

This function can take several seconds to execute, so you should typically only call it once when your application is launched. After that you will only need to reload the effect list after a pair of suspend and resume events.

You can remove effects from the returned list, if you want to restrict the set of effects the user can choose from.

If you present the standard parameters dialog box without providing a list of effects, the dialog function will get the list of available effects automatically. This will save you a few lines of code, but your users will have to wait for QuickTime to search for available effects and generate the list every time you open the dialog box.