QuickTime movies aren’t just for playing — they’re for playing with. Movies can interact with you, with your browser, with a server and with other movies. They can act as control panels, games, puzzles, musical instruments and much more.
Since it’s track-based, QuickTime lets you work with all kinds of media and languages to let you accomplish your desired end, from using QuickTime sprites to industry standards such as SMIL.
QuickTime Sprites
QuickTime sprites let you add interactivity to your media. QuickTime Sprites are animations that can be made of an image, a short image sequence or a video clip. These images can be moved around the movie frame on a vector path — creating the animation. As the sprite creator you need to create the image (such as a logo), specify the movement path (a spin motion, for example) and add other behaviors (like play a sound). QuickTime does the rest. The first frame of the animation contains the image data; the subsequent frames contain only a reference to the image, the behavior and new x and y coordinates where the image will be displayed. All calculations are done on the viewer’s computer, making sprites a very efficient, low-bandwidth way to create movement.
Sprites in Action
The actions of a sprite can be driven by system events such as mouse actions or keystrokes. So you can use sprites to design custom movie controllers that your audience can click on. Sprites can also know their own position coordinates, layer number and index and change their behavior according to criteria you define. For example, a sprite can look to see if it reaches the edge of the frame and execute a "bounce" movement when it does. A sprite can also modify its behavior with the passage of time, either "movie" time (the duration in which the movie plays) or in real time. In fact, a sprite can continue to act even after the movie it is in is paused or stopped.
An action attached to this sprite causes it to bounce whenever it reaches the edge of the frame. Sprite actions are controlled by adding a script to a sprite; do this using LiveStage Pro by Totally Hip or Adobe GoLive.
Load web pages
With Plug-In Helper, you can make any movie or its video tracks into clickable links that load web pages or QuickTime movies into a web browser, QuickTime Player or the QuickTime plug-in.
Access with Java
The QuickTime API is fully accessible through Java. With Java, you can write your own QuickTime-compatible applications, or run Java applets from QuickTime over the web inside a browser.
Link to URLs
HREF tracks can make the movie’s display area into a clickable link that points to different URLs at different times during playback.
Click on the movie to make it blink.
JavaScript Helper
Use JavaScript to help you detect how to add your movies to Web sites.
Chapters in Movies
Words and phrases in text tracks can be hyperlinks or act as a pop-up menu of entry points to chapters of a movie.
