QMedia | QMedia Light | Feature list | Online manual

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Media-rich experiences

QMedia is the plug-in that allows 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 accross platforms, as well as in heterogeneous client-server configurations.

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). Detatch 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. With QMedia 1.5 you can also get audio metering information and display custom sound level indicators.

Handle user and QuickTime events

QMedia 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. The user will not be able to start or stop the movie with the mouse.
• Track the custom button of the movie controller. When the mouse moves over a hot spot in a VR movie, search the database for information related to the hot spot.
• Track user navigation history in a multinode VR movie and use it to populate a popup menu. The user can go back to already visited nodes by selecting from the history popup menu.

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.)

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.

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. For example, create a slide show of your annual report charts, publish your photo album database to a movie, add scrolling banners with styled, anti-aliased, drop-shadow text to your 4D forms. Additional support for text includes searching in text tracks and adding "chapter list" tracks to movies.

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.)

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.

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.

System requirements

QMedia is available for MacOS X (Tiger or later) and Windows (XP/Vista), and is compatible with 4D versions 2004.x to 11.x SQL or later.