A Complete Guide to Web Design

352 Chapter 20 – Video on the Web

Video File Formats

Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition

(International Standards Organization) as the starting point for the development of

a unified digital media storage format for the MPEG-4 specification.

Multiplatform QuickTime movies

If you’re creating QuickTime movies on a Macintosh, your movies must be “flat-

tened” before they can be played on multiple platforms. Macintosh files have two

forks, a resource fork and a data fork, but other platforms only recognize single-

fork files containing the data fork alone. Flattening a movie is the process in which

the movie resource is moved out of the resource fork, creating a single-fork, self-

contained movie that can be played on all platforms.

In QuickTime’s MoviePlayer utility, click “Make playable on non-Macintosh

computers” or ”Make movie self-contained” when saving. Users of earlier versions

of QuickTime will need to use an additional flattening utility such as FlattenMooV

(available atftp://ftp.utexas.edu/pub/mac/graphics/flattenmoov.hqx).

Streaming QuickTime movies

QuickTime 2.5 introduced Apple’s “Fast Start” technology, which turns QuickTime

movies into a streaming format (meaning that they begin playing immediately and

continue to play as they download). QuickTime 3.0 will create flattened and

streaming movies automatically, without any extra steps (making Apple’s Internet

Movie Tool obsolete).

Reference movies

Another interesting feature of version 2.0 of the QuickTime plug-in is its support

for reference movies. Reference movies are used as pointers to alternate versions

(or “tracks”) of a movie, each optimized for a different connection speed. When a

user downloads the reference movie, the plug-in ensures that the best track for the

current connection speed is played.

You can also save a version of your movie that doesn’t use the Sorenson codec in

the reference file. This movie will play for users who don’t have the latest plug-in

version, ensuring backwards compatibility.

Media Cleaner Pro 3.0 from Terran Interactive (http://www.terran-int.com/) makes

it easy to create reference and alternative movies.

For more information

For general information on QuickTime, see Apple’s site athttp://www.apple.com/

quicktime/.

For information of particular interest to web developers, check out this page at the

Apple site:http://www.apple.com/quicktime/authors/webmas.html.

Another great resource for QuickTime information is the QuickTime FAQ athttp://

http://www.quicktimefaq.org/.