Product Description

QuickTime Java (QJT) is a terrific multimedia toolkit, but it's also terrifying to the uninitiated. Java developers who need to add audio, video, or interactive media creation and playback to their applications find that QTJ is powerful, but not easy to get into. In fact, when it comes to class-count, QuickTime Java is nearly as large as all of Java 1.1. Once you learn the entire scope of Apple's QuickTime software, you really appreciate the problem. At its simplest, QuickTime allows Mac and Windows users to play audio and video on their computers. But QuickTime is many things: a file format, an environment for media authoring, and a suite of applications that includes browser plug-ins for viewing media within a web page, a PictureViewer for working with still pictures, QuickTime Streaming Server for delivering streaming media files on the Internet in real time, and QuickTime Broadcaster for delivering live events on the Internet. Among others. As if that weren't daunting enough, the javadocs on QJT are wildly incomplete, and other books on the topic are long out of date and not well regarded, making progress with QTJ extremely difficult. So what can you do? Our new hands-on guide, QuickTime Java: A Developer's Notebook, not only catches up with this technology, but de-mystifies it. This practical "all lab, no lecture" book is an informal, code-intensive workbook that offers the first real look at this important software. Like other titles in our Developer's Notebook series, QuickTime Java: A Developer's Notebook is for impatient early adopters who want get up to speed on what they can use right now. It's deliberately light on theory, emphasizing example over explanation and practice over concept, so you can focus on learning by doing. QuickTime Java: A Developer's Notebook gives you just the functionality you need from QTJ. Even if you come to realize that 95% of the API is irrelevant to you, this book will help you master the 5% that really counts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #520632 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 255 pages

About the Author
Chris Adamson the editor for O'Reilly's Java websites, ONJava and java.net. He is the author of QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook and co-author of Swing Hacks. He is also a software consultant, in the form of Subsequently and Furthermore, Inc., specializing in Java, Mac OS X, and media development. He wrote his first Java applet in 1996 on a 16 MHz black-and-white PowerBook 160 with the little-seen Sun MacJDK 1.0. In a previous career, he was a Writer / Associate Producer at CNN Headline News. He has an MA in Telecommunication from Michigan State University, and a BA in English and BS in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.

Customer Reviews

if you do qtjava u need this book!
With Apple changing QuickTime for Java so anything you made when
use QTJava under MacOSX Java1.3 no longer worked under Java1.4 these required changes to most of your older QTJava code- if you wanted to have your code now run under Java1.4. Apple also moved classes to a new packages so to make the developers nightmare complete. BUT DONT WORRY! This book will show you workarounds for them missing classes (sequence grabbing is back! what a gem). Also covers all your needs as a new developer to the powers of QTJava. Time to make your very own QuickTime player in a few hours! You won't believe the stuff QuickTime can do under the hood. This books covers just more and more stuff as you go though it.

For me this QuickTime for Java book will be sitting next to the older most excellent book from Bill Stewart. I hope all books become as clear and well written as this one from Chris Adamson- top work. Sample code all over the shop; step by step stuff. Cuts to the tasks you will have to tackle without lengthy messing around. Brilliant buy if you want to do cool hardcore design media in java. Or just play a nice sound track in the background of your killer application - maybe u want to make the next video editing studio app, or your own media player, or a streaming server, or a image editor, or or or; you want ta take a ride?

Then again don't buy it! I wont have a job to go to in the morning! :).

Thorough and surprisingly in-depth
With this type of walkthrough book I usually expect to see just the basic features of the technology explored. This book goes surprisingly in-depth, covering topics like adding effects to playback, transforming movies during playback, overlays, and a wide variety of topics.

All that is crammed into a trim 200 page frame. This is achieved by concentrating mainly on the code, and effectively using a minimum of images. That's a trick given the graphics intensive nature of the topic.

This is not a book for beginners, it's a fast-paced walkthrough for experience developers who want something less referential than the JavaDocs.

Wonderful Tutorial on Quicktime for Java
This book is the one that should have been written for Java Media Framework, if only that API had ever lived up to its expectations. If you want to add media to your application, and you are using Java, Quicktime is your best bet. However, note that if the Quicktime for Java API doesn't seem very Java-like or object-oriented at first glance, then that's probably because it's not. That is because with Quicktime for Java you are not working with pure Java. Instead, you're invoking a flat C API to create and manipulate C or Pascal data structures using a thin Java wrapper. If you can live with that and you still want to use Quicktime for Java, this book is the essential guide and tutorial you need to get up and running. The book does not waste your time with API printouts or a Java programming language tutorial. Instead, like all books in the Developer's Notebook series, it gets down to business quickly by demonstrating working Java code for a number of useful tasks when working with media.

First, it tutors you on how to set up Quicktime for Java on a Windows machine. This task is more complex than you would think, and this book hits the mark on the subject. Next, it shows you how to play movies and audio files from your Java program. Next, the book tackles the editing of movies from a Java application. This includes topics such as cutting, pasting, going to specific frames of a movie, and "flattening" a movie. In Chapter four, the programmer is introduced to working with Java components and importing and exporting graphics. In chapter five, the user is introduced to working with QuickDraw, the Apple-originated drawing API. This is essential, since QuickDraw is what is used to work with captured images. Thus in this chapter the reader is taught how to transfer data between images and a movie. Next, the art of capturing both video and audio is explored, including capturing audio and video to the same file. The chapter is rounded out with the code for a motion detector. Chapter seven is devoted entirely to audio media. There are particularly timely topics here, such as how to read information from MP3 and from iTunes AAC files, how to provide basic audio controls, and how to build an audio track from raw samples. Similar information is provided in a separate chapter for information specific to video media.The final chapter discusses the effects available in Quicktime for Java, as well as how to add text captions and timecodes to your media.

All in all, I think the Developer Notebook format works well for this subject. At the beginning of each chapter there is an outline of the topics to be covered. For each topic there is a "How Do I Do That?" section that includes a short piece of Java code that performs the specified task. There is also a sample of the output you would expect to see on the screen that should result from executing the code. Next there is a paragraph entitled "What Just Happened?" that explains the code just shown, and finally each topic usually ends with a "What about.." section that answers common questions you may have about extending the code just shown. All code in the book can be downloaded from the book's website at O'Reilly and Associates.

This book is essential reading for anybody who needs to understand how to code with Quicktime for Java, and it is far better than any other publication on the subject that I have encountered. Amazon does not show the table of contents for this book, so I do so for the purpose of completeness:
Chapter 1. GETTING UP AND RUNNING WITH QUICKTIME FOR JAVA
Setting Up QTJ on Windows
Embedding QuickTime in HTML
Preflighting a QTJ Installation
Compiling QTJ Code
Opening and Closing the QuickTime Session
Playing an Audio File from the Command Line
Chapter 2. PLAYING MOVIES
Building a Simple Movie Player
Adding a Controller
Getting a Movie-Playing JComponent
Controlling a Movie Programmatically
Showing a Movie's Current Time
Listening for Movie State-Changes
Moving Frame by Frame
Playing Movies from URLs
Preventing "Tasking" Problems
Chapter 3. EDITING MOVIES
Copying and Pasting
Performing "Low-Level" Edits
Undoing an Edit
Undoing and Redoing Multiple Edits
Saving a Movie to a File
Flattening a Movie
Saving a Movie with Dependencies
Editing Tracks
Chapter 4. WORKING WITH COMPONENTS
Specifying a Component's Type
Exporting Movies
Exporting Movies to Any Installed Format
Importing and Exporting Graphics
Discovering All Installed Components
Chapter 5. WORKING WITH QUICKDRAW
Getting and Saving Picts
Getting a Pict from a Movie
Converting a Movie Image to a Java Image
A Better Movie-to-Java Image Converter
Drawing with Graphics Primitives
Getting a Screen Capture
Matrix-Based Drawing
Compositing Graphics
Chapter 6. CAPTURE
Capturing and Previewing Audio
Selecting Audio Inputs
Capturing Audio to Disk
Capturing Video to Disk
Capturing Audio and Video to the Same File
Making a Motion Detector
Chapter 7. AUDIO MEDIA
Reading Information from MP3 Files
Reading Information from iTunes AAC Files
Providing Basic Audio Controls
Providing a Level Meter
Building an Audio Track from Raw Samples
Chapter 8. VIDEO MEDIA
Combining Video Tracks
Overlaying Video Tracks
Building a Video Track from Raw Samples
Chapter 9. MISCELLANEOUS MEDIA
Creating Captions with Text Media
Creating Links with HREF Tracks
Adding Timecodes
Creating Zero-Source Effects
Creating One-Source Effects (Filters)
Creating Two-Source Effects (Transitions)