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Introduction to QTKit Capture Programming Guide

Contents:

Organization of This Document
See Also

The QuickTime Kit is a Objective-C framework (QTKit.framework) with a rich API for manipulating time-based media. Introduced in Mac OS X v10.4, the QuickTime Kit provides a set of Objective-C classes and methods designed for the basic manipulation of media, including movie playback, editing, import and export to standard media formats, among other capabilities. With the release of Mac OS X v10.5 and the latest release of QuickTime 7, the reach and capability of the framework have been extended. The QuickTime Kit now includes the addition of 17 new classes, all designed to support professional-level video and audio capture, and pro-grade recording of media.

This guide describes the conceptual underpinnings of these new capture classes, and shows how to use the classes and methods in your application, through code examples and step-by-step tutorials.

If you are a QuickTime Cocoa developer who wants to integrate QuickTime movies in your application, you should read the material in this document. You don’t necessarily need to be a seasoned Cocoa programmer to take advantage of the capabilities provided in this framework, although you’ll need some prior experience working with Objective-C, Xcode, and Interface Builder to build and compile the code examples in the guide.

The various QuickTime and Cocoa mailing lists also provide a useful developer forum for raising issues and answering questions that are posted.

Organization of This Document

This document is organized into an overview chapter, followed by chapters that describe how you can build a simple QTKit capture application with an optimal number of lines of code, then extend that application with audio and DV support. Another chapter describes how you can construct an application that lets you capture single frames and produce stop or still motion video animation.

• “Basics of Using QTKit Capture” introduces you to the key concepts associated with the QuickTime Kit capture architecture and describes how you can use the capture classes and methods in your application.

• “Building a Simple QTKit Capture Application” discusses step-by-step how you can build a simple yet powerful QTKit capture player application that lets you capture a video stream and record the media to a QuickTime movie.

• “Adding Audio Input and DV Camera Support” describes how you can extend the functionality of your QTKit capture player application by adding support for audio input and DV cameras with only a few lines of Objective-C code.

• “Creating a QTKit Stop or Still Motion Application” describes how you can construct a simple still motion capture application that lets you capture a live video feed, grab frames one at a time with great accuracy, and then record the output of those frames to a QuickTime movie––with less than 100 lines of Objective-C code.

See Also

If you are new to Cocoa or QuickTime, you should read these documents, which are intended to get you up to speed with both Apple technologies: Getting Started with Cocoa and Getting Started with QuickTime.

The following documents also provide helpful guides and references for many of the tasks described in this programming guide:

• QTKit Framework Reference contains the class and protocol reference documentation for the QTKit framework.

• QuickTime Kit Programming Guide shows how to build and extend a simple QTKitPlayer application, using Xcode 2.2 and Interface Builder.

• Interface Builder User Guide describes the latest version of Interface Builder 3.

• Xcode Quick Tour for Mac OS X provides an introduction on how to use the Xcode IDE.

• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, by Aaron Hillegass, is a useful guide for newcomers to the Objective-C programming language.

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