QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 9. Miscellaneous Media

Audio and video are the most obvious and prominent kinds of media that can be found in a QuickTime movie, but the story doesn’t end there. Take a look at quicktime.std.movies.media, and you’ll find more than a dozen subclasses of Media, each representing media types that can be referenced by tracks in QuickTime movies.

This chapter is going to show off four of these, as much to show the variety of QuickTime as to illuminate their practical uses. These four are:

• Text media

• HREF media (actually a special case of text)

• Timecode media

• Effects media (actually a special case of video)

Elsewhere in the book, I’ve also mentioned MPEG media, which isn’t so much a new media type as it is a disappointing compromise—QuickTime can’t present the audio and video of a multiplexed MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 file as separate tracks, so instead it uses a single track pointing to “MPEGMedia,” which has both visual and audio characteristics (i.e., its media handler implements both VisualMediaHandler and AudioMediaHandler).

I’m not covering several media types for reasons of space and concision. Sprites (represented by SpriteMedia) and QuickTime VR (QTVRMedia) are plenty cool; however, each required an entire volume of the old Inside Macintosh series, making them too involved to handle in this format. ThreeDMedia is effectively deprecated and isn’t even present in Mac OS X. A few other media types are present largely as implementations for higher-level features—for instance, MovieMedia ...