Chapter 5. Using QuickTime

QuickTime grew out of an early Macintosh OS 6.0 software toolset for transferring large media files. Because of its initial heavy use for visual content, the standard nomenclature for QuickTime files became (and remains) movie. The regular suffix for QuickTime files is .mov. This can be a little confusing, so this book will stick to calling QuickTime encoded on-demand files files, although some software will refer to the files as movies.

One of the unique elements of the QuickTime streaming format is a process called hinting, which is required when authoring on-demand files to be streamed through a QuickTime streaming server. This process adds extra information to an encoded on-demand file and creates hints for the streaming server to deliver the file more reliably to your listener's player.

NOTE

Windows Media and RealMedia formats also include this type of additional information in their streams, but it's handled transparently during the authoring process. Unlike Windows Media and RealMedia, QuickTime allows you to author streams without the hinting information, which is almost always done when serving via HTTP/Progressive streaming. Hinting your QuickTime on-demand files typically doubles the size of the resulting file.

Audio can be included in QuickTime files in two ways. The first method uses what is known as a self-contained file, which actually contains the audio information. The other method uses a file type that is referred to as having dependencies and is actually a reference, or pointer, to the file that contains the audio information. Dependencies are helpful if you're making a presentation with the QuickTime format and using various individual media files on repeated occasions. Referencing the self-contained files with dependencies frees you from having to include the same audio (a disk space eater) every time that audio is used. Working with files that have and use dependencies can quickly become confusing; therefore, this book only works with self-contained files.

QuickTime 5 is used for all examples.