Topic awaiting preservation: Quicktime/Movie events in Javascript (Page 1 of 1)

Is there anyway for Javascript/VBscript to detect when a embeded quicktime movie (or any other format for that matter) that is playing reaches a certain frame such as 12:34, so that the movie can be paused at that point and extra information be displayed about that point in the video on say a DIV tag bellow the movie?



- Face the Present
- AIM: MASKKKK

[This message has been edited by Maskkkk (edited 04-14-2003).]

[This message has been edited by Maskkkk (edited 04-14-2003).]

Hmm...or maybe I could just do a setTimeout for long enough to get to that point in the video and it will pause it....
do you think that would work hmmmm? Little advise here....



- Face the Present
- AIM: MASKKKK

Here's the apple QT JS API docs



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.

Quicktime and Javascript can play toghther but the support for it is sketchy.

First of all, for any user on IE/Mac it just plainly won't work. IE/Mac doesn't allow any scripting to plugins period. Nadda, nothing, zip.

IE/PC users will need to allow active-x control to quicktime as IE/PC don't support plugins at all, QT in IE/PC is run through an active-x object, the JS commands are still, for the most part, the same but by default the scripting ability isn't enabled and the user will likely be prompted with a security dialiouge asking them if they want to allow this to happen. Unfortionatly, most users will automacitally select no to this prompt.

Mozilla/all platrofms, will be able to script to Quicktime but you'll need to have a very very recent version of mozilla and the latest version of Quicktime (version 6 I believe). You can detect this using script but it's still a pain and the QT player isn't all that big.

Furthermore, other applications like to think they should play all .mov files just because they can read and play .mov, real-player for example, but the real-one player can't script to it at all and the user won't even get a prompt to switch back to using quicktime if their mimeTypes are set up to use a different player other than quicktime itself.

So, while it is possible and you can do some really nifty stuff whilst scripting to Quicktime it's not very practical or supported. You'd be better off using flash or shockwave if you can. I think flash can script to internal video but I'm not 100% certain on that. Director/shockwave on the other hand definatly can. Using director means you can have complete access to directors lingo flexability and the complete quicktime scripting engine all in the one package, but the shockwave plugin isn't as widely supported as flash.

Anyways, that's just my 0.2

Flash does seem to have this option, I tried using this other technology called SMIL which seems a bit sketchy, like they haven't standardized it well anywhere yet. SMIL is an XML subset, and I had the most success with it in Quicktime, but it's not supported very well. I could get a video to play in it, but I couldn't get any other text added to the document like I wanted, so that it would display the text during diffrent segments of the video.

I also tried importing the .mov file into flash, it looked like it was going to work, but then flash acted like it was not responding. I think this is due to the fact that the .mov file is like 30 MB.



- Face the Present
- AIM: MASKKKK

30mb? I don't see how that sould really be a problem. If flash did support quicktime movies then it shouldn't bundle them into the .swf file, it should store them extrenally, at least, every other authoring application that I've used has always stored large media like video externally even when it's being distributed.

Sorry, I know nothing at all about SMIL... I've heard the term before but that's about the extent of it.

If you really *need* to use quicktime and have it interactive you really can't go past director. It's not that much of a strech away from flash useability wise and the plugin is fairly popular. The other option would be to as you said, just use Javascript with setTimeout()'s to get what you want. Or, depending on what your actually trying to do you could break the movie up into several smaller movies and possibly work things out that way using iFrames to load in the new movies as well as trigger new text in the document. Another option would be to use a video editing program to superimpose the text over the video itself, as long as it's only a tiny ammout of text that is.

What is it your trying to do exactly?

[This message has been edited by Dracusis (edited 04-16-2003).]

Right gotta find out what you are trying to do here.

My experience with SMIL was a while ago and my opinion at that time was that it sucked. That being said Quicktime did support it relatively well. When developing a Quicktime channel I ended up using a product called LiveStage which may have been the best for doing complicated integrated Quicktime apps.

That being said, it was a complicated and expensive piece of software and I had to use a lot of hinky things to make it work and that was with a contact from apple helping me out.



.:[ Never resist a perfect moment ]:.