QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Assumptions and Definitions

This book assumes that you are comfortable with Java 2 Standard Edition, Version 1.4 (J2SE 1.4). You should understand the core language and packages, particularly AWT and Swing. I use both AWT and Swing extensively—sometimes in the same example, when it’s clearer to do it that way—AWT is much faster, but Swing has some space-saving conveniences that keep the examples short and focused.

Note

If you don’t think AWT is overly verbose, try building a choice dialog sometime.

You should also have at least a passing familiarity with concepts of digital media. Although the Developer’s Notebooks aren’t about theory, there are a few terms you should know off the bat.

Movie

In QuickTime, a "movie” isn’t just an audio/video file—it is an organization of media elements that can include audio, graphics, video, text, interactivity, etc. For the purposes of this book, anything that can be represented by the Movie class is a “movie,” including remote MP3 streams, wired-sprite video games, etc.

Codec

A codec is a piece of code that can encode and/or decode media in a given format. Apple’s documentation often breaks this down into media handlers , which understand a given encoding, and compressors and decompressors to compress or extract data.

Container format

File formats like QuickTime .mov or Microsoft’s AVI are containers that can hold different kinds of content, such as a combination of audio, video, or other kinds of media. Note that parsing the format and parsing its contents are two separate things: QuickTime can handle the format of a given AVI file but might not support a codec used in it (and vice versa for libraries that support the QuickTime file format). Also, a container like QuickTime can refer to remote data, such as media in another file or out on the network, so a given .mov file does not necessarily contain all the media needed to play the movie.