Making a Reference Movie from a Text File (XML)
You can also create a .qtl reference movie by typing three lines of text using a text editor or word processor. Actually, you can copy and paste the first two lines because they’re always the same.
The syntax may seem a little cryptic, but the process is very simple. If your movie is named My.mov , your text file looks like this:
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<?quicktime type=”application/x-quicktime-media-link”?>
<embed src=”http://www.myserver.com/Movies/My.mov” />
The first two lines tell QuickTime that this is a reference movie. Put the URL of your actual movie in the src parameter on the third line.
The URL can use HTTP, RTSP, FTP, or any protocol QuickTime supports. You can’t use relative URLs over the Internet though–the browser gives the file to QuickTime from the default download folder of the local disk; it doesn’t tell QuickTime the file’s original URL. Relative URLs work only with local movies.
Save this file as plain text with the .qtl file extension.
A nice feature of this kind of reference movie is that you can pass additional instructions to QuickTime Player in the third line. The player understands the following commands:
- autoplay=”true” | “false” ( @timestamp is not yet supported)
- controller=”true” | “false”
- fullscreen=”normal” | “double” | “half” | “current” | “full”
- href=”url”
- loop=”true” | “false” | “palindrome”
- playeveryframe=”true” | “false”
- qtnext=”url”
- quitwhendone=”true” | “false”
Just place these commands inside the <EMBED> tag on the third line of the.qtl file. Here’s an example:
<embed src=”http://a.server.com/aMovie.mov” autoplay =”true” />
You may have noticed two commands for QuickTime Player that don’t have equivalents in the HTML parameters for the plug-in– quitwhendone andfullscreen .
The fullscreen command tells QuickTime Player to use the whole screen to display the movie, using a black background if the movie does not perfectly fit the screen dimensions. For more about full-screen movies, see Full-Screen Movies.
The quitwhendone command tells QuickTime Player to quit when the movie ends, effectively returning the viewer to the browser. When combined with the fullscreen command, this can create a seamless experience in which the QuickTime Player application is almost invisible–the viewer clicks a link, the screen goes black and a movie plays, then the browser window comes back exactly as it was. To see an example, load Fullscreen.mov in your browser (it’s in the SpecialDelivery folder of the CD).
The remaining commands behave like their HTML <EMBED> tag equivalents, with the minor exception of autoplay , which doesn’t yet support the newautoplay=”@hh:mm:ss:ff” delayed-start feature.
You can create other kinds of reference movies in QuickTime, including reference movies that cause QuickTime Player to load different movies based on the viewer’s language or Internet connection speed. Using any kind of reference movie allows your intended movie to play while downloading (fast start), and prevents the browser from leaving the movie on the viewer’s disk if it’s not wanted.