Introduction to QuickTime 7 for Windows

QuickTime is the industry standard for multimedia programming and application development, with a rich and evolving API comprised of more than 2500 function calls. Its component-based architecture is highly extensible, enabling applications to display, import, export, and modify a broad range of digital media, including audio, video, still images, text, Flash, MIDI, sprites, VR panoramas, among other media types. QuickTime is designed from the ground up to work with local disk-based media, media accessed over a network, or streams of real-time data.

This document provides detailed information about the new features, changes, and enhanced capabilities that are available in QuickTime 7 for Windows.

QuickTime 7 for Windows is a major release involving a significant update and revision of the QuickTime code base that includes the introduction of H.264, a new QuickTime Player built from the ground up, CoreAudio for Windows, QuickTime Audio on top of CoreAudio, with multichannel audio support, and a new QuickTime 7 for Windows installer.

In this section:

Who Needs To Read This Document
How This Document Is Organized
See Also

Who Needs To Read This Document

If you are a QuickTime API-level developer, content author, multimedia producer, or Webmaster who is currently working with QuickTime, you should read this document.

The document is written for developers who use QuickTime on the Windows platform and want to learn about the new programming features available in QuickTime 7 for Windows.

How This Document Is Organized

This update guide is intended to provide QuickTime developers, as well as other developers new to the platform, with a comprehensive description of the changes and enhancements in this major software release. Beyond this brief introductory chapter, the material discussed in Chapter 2 of the guide points to and cross-references in Chapter 3 the many new functions available in QuickTime 7 for Windows, with an emphasis on understanding their usage for application developers.

Chapter 1, “Introduction to QuickTime 7 for Windows,” discusses who should read this document, as well as other sources of information about the QuickTime documentation suite.
Chapter 2, “What’s New in QuickTime 7 for Windows,” describes in detail the many new and enhanced features available in QuickTime 7. It is intended to provide developers with a conceptual overview, in addition to code samples and illustrations of usage, so that developers can take advantage of many of the new features in QuickTime 7 for Windows in their applications.
Chapter 3, “New Functions, Data Types, and Constants in QuickTime 7 for Windows,” describes all the new QuickTime functions, data structures, constants, and callbacks available in this software release.

The reference information currently presented in Chapter 3 of this update guide is also available in the QuickTime API Reference document. All of the new QuickTime functions, data structures, and callbacks in QuickTime 7 are incorporated into the QuickTime API Reference for easy access and reference, either in HTML or PDF formats.

If you are new to QuickTime, you should begin by referring to Getting Started With QuickTime, which describes the various starting points and learning paths for working with this rich, multimedia API.

Updates to the QuickTime technical documentation website are provided on a regular basis. Developers can also subscribe to various mailing lists for the latest news and information.

To sign up for any of Apple’s Developer Programs, go to: http://developer.apple.com/membership/index.html.

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