TABLE OF CONTENTS In a nutshell, the Apple QuickTime COM Control is a component that provides us as developers with facilities to load, view, edit and even create digital media within our applications. All of this powerful functionality is of course provided by QuickTime but, in the well-established tradition of good COM components, the complexity of the underlying technology is distilled into a set of easy-to-master COM interfaces.
Component-oriented developers are not the type to waste hours (or even precious minutes!) poring over documentation not when it s so easy to drop an unfamiliar component onto an empty form and see how far we can get. The goal is usually to figure out as quickly as possible whether or not the new component meets our expectations. That s really all this chapter is about: uncovering the basics of the QuickTime COM Control as painlessly as possible. Later chapters follow with more systematic and in-depth information on QuickTime and the QuickTime Control.
No self-respecting book on practical software development would be complete without the de rigueur Hello World! application to kick things off. But since we re dealing here with an exciting media technology rather than a dull programming language, perhaps our starting point (Figure 2.1) should be a minimal application to load and play a Hello World! movie complete with backing sound track!
Since we don t want to lose anybody before we even get started, let s first make sure that you have indeed installed QuickTime...
