| Java developers who need to add audio, video, or interactive media creation and playback to their applications find that QuickTime Java is a powerful toolkit, but one that's not easy to get into. This book offers the first real look at this important software with an informal, code-intensive style that lets impatient early adopters focus on learning by doing. You get just the functionality you need.
Java has been a huge success in many fieldsdistributed enterprise applications, mobile phones, web applicationsbut one field that it has clearly flopped in is media. A sound API, javax.sound, suffices for simple playback and mixing of a handful of old formats, and was added to the Java core (the classes any Java runtime must include) in Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.3. The optional package for media, Java Media Framework (JMF), fared much worse. After two releases, a 1.0 that provided only playback and a 2.0 that added streaming, transcoding, and some lower-level access, the product was slipped into maintenance mode and has seen little attention since 1999. In fact, the most monumental change to JMF in this time was the loss of a feature: MP3 support was removed in 2002, due to licensing concerns. Making things worse, JMF's all-Java version had weak support for popular formats and codecs. Native editions could play more media, but Sun initially created versions only for Windows and Solaris, later providing minimal support to a third-party Linux port and absolutely no support for a Mac version. Setting aside the dubious premise of Solaris as a media production OS, this effectively made JMF practical only on Windows, eliminating Java's cross-platform advantage.
Enter QuickTime, a multimedia framework originally introduced by Apple for the ("Classic") Mac OS in late 1991. QuickTime defines both a file format (the QuickTime .mov format) and many APIs for working with time-based media. The provided functions allow applications to create media (either synthetically or via capture), manipulate it, and present it. Media types supported by QuickTime include sound and video, timed text (captions), graphics, interactivity, and a panoramic-image style of virtual reality (VR).
Unfortunately, despite having an industry-leading multimedia framework, in 1998 there was no straightforward means of exposing QuickTime to Java developers. And whereas most APIs start with an interface and then gain a reference implementation, Apple had an implementation and the native QuickTime libraries, but no Java interface. Compounding the problem, QuickTime was designed to be called from C (sometimes called "straight C" or "procedural C") and thus lacked the object orientation a Java interface would call for.
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