QMedia 1.5

QMedia 1.5 is created as plug-in which supports 4D applications to include, play back, edit and integrate tightly with all digital media types supported by QuickTime, Apple's award-winning, industry standard, multimedia technology.

QMedia broadens the spectrum of applications that 4D developers can address by transforming 4th Dimension into a multimedia container and content development environment. Applications written with QMedia can be deployed across platforms, as well as in heterogeneous client-server configurations.

Major Features:

1. Embed multimedia in your forms
   • Play back in 4D forms or external windows all QuickTime-supported media (still images, standard movies, VR movies, animated GIFs, sounds, music, MIDI, MPEG on Mac, etc).
   • Control the visibility of the movie area and of the movie controller (in whole or in parts).
   • Detach the movie from its controller, and place each independently inside the plug-in area. Configure the area for movie editing, looping, keystroke handling and drag and drop to the Macintosh desktop.
   • Get audio metering information and display custom sound level indicators.
2. Handle user and QuickTime events
   • Gives programmatic access to many user events and QuickTime events through callback methods. Trap specific event types, examine event-specific properties, take some action, and finally decide and tell QuickTime if it should handle the event or not. Some of the things you can do with event handlers are:
   • Trap mouse clicks.
   • Track the custom button of the movie controller.
   • Track user navigation history in a multinode VR movie and use it to populate a popup menu.
3. Access movie properties down to track level
   • Get and set numerous movie properties like volume, rate, duration, time scale, movie preview, poster frame, annotations etc.
   • Access and modify movie tracks and track properties (create, delete, enable/disable, track volume, duration, graphics mode, transformation matrix, etc.)
4. Control VR movies
   • Fully integrate virtual reality (VR) movies in your database.
   • Change pan, tilt and field of view angles, and other properties.
   • Get node and hotspot information.
   • Use event handling to create database-driven VR tours of museums, buildings, collections etc.
5. Publish database data with QuickTime
   • Add media to movies: add pictures and image files to video tracks, text to text tracks to generate movies out of database data.
   • Additional support for text includes searching in text tracks and adding "chapter list" tracks to movies.
6. Media conversion and compression
   • QMedia includes commands for converting media formats with QuickTime's movie import and export components.
   • Convert media files to movie files and export movies (or tracks thereof) to media files.
   • Re-compress video and sound in movie tracks using the growing list of QuickTime codecs (Cinepak, Animation, Motion JPEG, Sorenson video, etc.)
7. Prepare movies for Internet delivery
   • Preparation of a movie for publishing on the world wide web is done with three lines of code.
   • QMedia creates single-fork, self-contained, fast-start movies that stream when served to the browser QuickTime plug-in.
8. Capture audio and video using the sequence grabber
   • The QuickTime sequence grabber does frame grabbing from any media source that can be connected to your Mac or PC computer and has a QuickTime driver. Such media sources include video cameras, digital cameras, sound, music and text sources, etc.

Enhancements:

• QMedia is now packaged as a cross-platform, bundled plug-in, supporting 4D versions 2004.x and 11.3 or later.
• QMedia is a Universal Binary, i.e. it runs natively on both PPC and Intel-based Macs when used with 4D v11.x.
• Added a set of new commands that allow audio level metering on movies (volume and frequency levels).
• Implemented a workaround for a problem in QuickTime versions later than 7.3, where the short pathname was returned instead of the long one.
• Due to 4D's new threading model in v11.x QuickTime VR movies now play correctly on Mac OS X. Under 4D v2004.x QMedia implements a workaround that achieves the same result.
• Fixed bugs:
• • Potential crash during startup in 4D 2004.x on Mac OS X. Fixed.
  • Potential crash during startup of 4D Server 2004.x on Windows if there was a TRACE command or a breakpoint in the "On Server Startup" method that would trigger the 4D Debugger window. Fixed.
  • Due to Mac OS 9 backwards compatibility, long filenames returned by the plug-in could be truncated on Mac OS X. Fixed.
  • Pathnames containing accented characters would not be interpreted correctly on Mac OS X. Fixed.
  • Re-opening the currently open database could lead to a crash. Fixed.

Requirements:

• MacOS X and WindowsXP/Vista with 4D 2004/v11.