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 As if that weren't daunting enough, the javadocs on QJT are wildly incomplete, and other books on the topic are long out of date and not well regarded, making progress with QTJ extremely difficult.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.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
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... more info
Multimedia and Java made simple:
This book is great! This notebook makes all the QuickTime supported formats available to a Java developer. Like all the books in the notebook series, plenty of code, plenty of information to get up and running. I really liked the information on reading the tag info from MP3s and AAC files, very useful. Multimedia and Java made simple.
An excellent, useful book:
While at first I thought O'Reilly's new "developer's notebook" series seemed a bit hokey, this book is extremely useful. It's concise and to the point, but full of good examples and information. A plus of the small size is that it's more to-the-point and cheaper than a typical O'Reilly book (which very often seem to ramble on and on about marginally useful information, seemingly in order to justify their $45+ price tags).
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... more info
