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Mstation Book Reviews
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Tue, 01 Mar 2005

QuickTime for Java

Chris Adamson, Quicktime for Java: A Developer's Notebook,
O'Reilly

This is the first of the Developer's Notebook series that has come to Mstation. The idea is that they are no-nonsence guides for deveopers ... stripped and to the point. The Intro to this book even suggests that your knowledge of Java should be pretty good otherwise ... Well, it's not nearly as unfriendly as that might suggest.

Java fans will know that the Media Framework hasn't exactly been the highpoint of the language -- too few codecs and facilities. MP3 was even dropped in 2002 because of legal fears. To the partial rescue came Apple's Quicktime crew with Biscotti which provided a Java layer to make QuickTime calls and also an object oriented API. The problem was that the docs had a QuickTime-centric quality that made them not all that useful to Java people who didn't already know QuickTime. This book sets out to remedy that.

This book takes you through examples of playback and editing and includes special sections on audio and video. In the audio section, for example, it shows how to read information from MP3 and iTunes AAC files as well as coding a level meter and building an audio track from raw samples. It's all interesting and well put together.

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