Libquicktime 0.9.10 review

Libquicktime is a library for reading and writing quicktime files. Note: libquicktime is in no way related to the original quickti

License: LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Burkhard Plaum

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Libquicktime is a library for reading and writing quicktime files.

Note: libquicktime is in no way related to the original quicktime software, which can be found here. You should not expect all quicktime files created by original software to be playable by libquicktime or vice versa. You might, however, be lucky in some cases.

Furthermore, it's is no longer a development goal to support as many codecs as possible. Instead we want to keep things simple and provide a library, which can create reasonable compatible Quicktime and AVI files either uncompressed (for high-end or production applications) or with decent compression codecs for end user applications.

On the decoder side, the goal is that libquicktime should at least be able to decode it's own files. If other decoders can be added with a reasonable amount of labour, they will be supported as well. If you are looking for a general purpose library, which supports other formats than Quicktime/AVI and many more codecs, try gmerlin_avdecoder or ffmpeg.

Here are some key features of "Libquicktime":
Sourcetree upgraded with autoconf/automake/libtool and all the other stuff, people like in "standard" linux libraries.
All 3rd party libraries (jpeg, OggVorbis) were removed to reduce download size, compilation time and code duplication on users harddisks. Instead, the sytemwide installed libaries are autodetected by the configure script.
All codecs have been moved into dynamically loadable modules. This makes it possible to distribute closed source codecs (or codecs with an incompatible license) as separate packages.
Unlike other quicktime libraries, we are source compatible with quicktime4linux.
The codecs themselves are also source compatible with quicktime4linux, so porting codecs between quicktime4linux and libquicktime requires only little brain load.
Special API extensions allow access to the codec registry. Applications can get important information about the codecs, their settable parameters etc. at runtime.
Libquicktime 0.9.4 introduced support for handling QTVR files. QTVR is a technology to store panoramas and interactive "3D pictures" (Object Movies) in Quicktime files. For more information check out this document.
The current implementation allows developers to write applications that display and/or create QTVR V1.0 object movies and panoramas.

Although it's usable there are a few limitations:

the newer versions of the QTVR format aren't supported (yet)
no multinode support
no abstraction of the movie structure. That means the application writer has to take care of which frame to decode when (object movies) and how to piece them together (panoramas) (see http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1036.html and http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn/tn1035.html for information about that)
no documentation

What's New in This Release:
This is a bugfix release, no new features were added.
Writing of compressed frames (important for DVgrab/Kino) was fixed, as well as seeking with some codecs.
Furthermore, the source tree and CVS were cleaned up.