I see that Adrian has found some useful info on embedding QuickTime movies in web pages. It is very cool how you can set up a series of individual movies to play in sequence using the embed tag alone. I think this is particularly useful in the context of moblogging/videoblogging.
One of the characteristics of video taken with a camera phone or digital still camera is that it tends to feature one continuous shot. While Quicktime Pro allows for fairly easy basic editing of shots, by using the embed tag to string the shots together the user can create separate annotated permalinks for each shot (say videos from a holiday) and string a selection of shots together for a ‘hilights reel’ at no extra storage cost and with very little difficulty. Tools like QT HTML help too.
Some more snooping around the Apple developer site reveals some of the other network friendly abilities Quicktime has. QuickTime XML Importers describes how a basic xml text file with the ‘.mov’ extension can be used to do a number of handy things. For example, if you are using a new codec or component in your movies which are not yet common, such a file can be used test for its presence and ask the user if they want to download it.
The ability to read xml files also means that you can set up a ‘Quicktime Link File’ (.qtl) to do things like: open a movie in the Quicktime Player application, play at full screen, and then quit when the movie has finished. ‘.qtl’ files can be written by hand in any text editor, generated by script, or created using Quicktime Player’s XML Exporter.
Another flavour of XML is SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) which provides a standard cross platform way to create playlists and presentations combining discrete content (interestingly, the MMS standard for mobile multimedia messaging is based on SMIL). For example a SMIL file can source a slide show of JPEG photos from one server and display text annotations for each photo, while playing an accompanying MP3 from another. SMIL also allows multiple visual sources to be arranged on screen and played independently. Quicktime and SMIL provides a detailed run through of the functions available and how to apply them, while Embedding SMIL Documents in a Web Page describes that process.
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