There are some basic concepts that you need to be familiar with so you can read the rest of this book without getting a headache. (Well, that's the idea, anyway.) This chapter covers three fundamental topics:

• What's a QuickTime Movie?

  Think you already know? Check it out.

• What's QuickTime?

  What you get, what it does, what it runs on.

• Delivery: Local, Fast Start, and Streaming

  Three very different ways to deliver QuickTime.

What's a QuickTime Movie?

If we think about it at all, most of us expect a movie to contain moving pictures and synchronized sound. A QuickTime movie is a lot more versatile than that. Of course, it can be a moving picture with synchronized sound, but it can just as easily be a series of still images with synchronized text, or invisible background music, or a talking Web tour with a graphic control panel of your own design.

• A QuickTime movie is a file that tells the computer what kind of media to present and when to present it.

  The media can be video, sound, MIDI music, text, animated sprites, still images, even a series of website addresses. QuickTime has media handlers that will show the video, play the sounds, synthesize music from MIDI instructions, render text on the user's screen, animate sprites and test for user interaction, or load a series of websites in a browser frame. QuickTime can synchronize all of these activities, creating a multimedia experience that the word "movie" doesn't adequately describe.

  

• A...