Overview

Text can add a lot to your movies without taking up much bandwidth. QuickTime has the ability to embed text, such as titles, credits, and subtitles, in a movie as text. It's rendered on the screen by the viewer's computer only when the movie is played. Text is marvelously compact; a character can be encoded in just 8 bits. Even last year's modem can pull 28,800 bits a second, or 3,600 characters. That's a lot of text.

An 8-bit text character, rendered on the screen in 18-point type, might cover 200 pixels, each using 24 bits. That's 4,800 bits to represent the same character. Sending it as text gives 600:1 compression, and because it's rendered by the viewer's computer, its appearance is razor sharp no video compression artifacts.

QuickTime text is a flexible media type. You can specify the font, text color, size, and styles such as bold, outline, or italic. Text can have drop shadows or be highlighted at specific moments. Text can automatically scroll across the screen. Text can be overlaid on moving video or a still image as the movie is playing.