About Moviewer

Moviewer is a scriptable movie viewer application. Itıs based on the DTS MacApp Movie Viewer sample application, with support added for OSA and improved support for QuickTime. 

Source code for Moviewer is available. The latest version of Moviewer builds with MacApp Release 13 update 4. 

For more information on MacApp, go the the Apple MacApp web site at:
http://developer.apple.com/tools/macapp/

Moviewer is unsupported sample code, but feedback on bugs and suggestions on how to make it better scriptable would be appreciated. 

Tom Becker
Apple Computer, Inc.
12/12/98


Features

Open and play movies, with a specified window style, position, scale factor, and sound volume. Can go to a time (by numeric value or by name), select a range of time. Can show and hide the movie controller (play bar). Can specify looping, play the selection only, and to close the movie or quit when done playing. 

Basic editing includes cut, copy, paste and undo. Changed movies can be saved. 

Almost all commands are scriptable and recordable. Supports a script menu. 


Known Problems and Limitations

It is possible to crash the application by opening a large movie and running a script that starts the movie playing. Workaround is to give the application more memory. 

Sound-only movies should be opened with the controller shown by default, but they're not. Workaround is to specify the property "show controller: true" when playing movies that you know are sound-only. 

There is no feature for setting the rate of the movie. Right now, that feature seems like it would be nice to have, but not essential, so Iım not planning to add it. 

The clear menu command is not recordable. 

If you use the 'floating' window style to make the movie window float over all the other application windows, it is not possible to click on the floating window unless the Scriptable Movie Viewer is the active application. Instead, the mouse click is handled by the currently active application as if the movie window were not there. 

A floating window must be referred to in scripts as a 'palette' rather than a 'window'. In other words, changing the window style of a movie may also change the class of its window. You can use recording to find out which class to use. 


Revision History

Moviewer 1.1a3

Allow a movie to be remotely taken out of present mode by setting its playing property to false. Return an error if an attempt to close a movie is made while it is in present mode. This prevents a crash that would otherwise occur. In the future, the code may be reorganized to allow remote closing of a movie while it is in present mode. For now, scripts can work around the limitation by stopping the movie before closing it. 

Moviewer 1.1a2

Presenting a streaming movie full screen now works correctly. Thanks to anne NMI jones, Sylvain Rouse and Jeff Moore for their valuable suggestions. Added ³all documents² support and a filter function to the Navigation Services open dialog so .rtsp files can be opened on MacOS 8.5. 

Moviewer 1.1a1

Fixed a bug introduced in 1.0f1 that caused a crash when opening a movie on a system where QuickTime pro is not registered. Added support for presenting a movie full screen. 

Moviewer 1.0

Removed code for checking whether QuickTime is registered. 

Moviewer 1.0b2

Weak linked ControlsLib and WindowsLib so the PowerPC build can run on Mac OS 8.1 and earlier. 

Moviewer 1.0b1

Added a 'floating' window style and made it the only one that floats over all other application windows. The 'plain' and 'mini' window styles are back to behaving like normal windows. 

Specify the defaults for the Navigation Services open dialog so it initially shows all readable files. 

Moviewer 1.0a5

Fixes a crash when opening a window in the 68K build when running on MacOS 8.1 or earlier. Using the TSM windows on MacOS 8.1 is more complicated than I expected, so for now the floating windows will float over all other applications only on MacOS 8.5 or later. 

Add a PowerPC native build of the application. 

Moviewer 1.0a4

Commands for setting movie properties and cut/copy/paste/undo are recordable. This also fixes the problem where the cut/copy/paste/undo Apple Events had to be sent to the application. Now they can be sent to the movie they operate on, and they record that way too. 

The 'plain' and 'mini' window styles now are floating windows. On MacOS 8.5, or on earlier systems with the Text Services Manager (such as the Japanese Language Kit), they will float over all other applications, not just other windows inside the Scriptable Movie Viewer. 

Moviewer 1.0a3

The duration keyword for the select command (select at <time> [duration <durn>]) now really is optional, just like the dictionary says. 

Renamed the volume property of the movie to 'sound volume' to avoid conflict with a 'set volume' OSAX that ships with Mac OS 8.1. 

The movie size is preserved when the window style is changed. However, this works only if the movie size has been set from an AppleScript, not from the menu. 

Fixed a crashing bug with setting a property across multiple objects (set playing of every movie to false). 

Fixed a crashing bug with setting a property of the application (set clipboard to "Fred"). Please note that setting the clipboard property will work only if the application is first made active. 

Made sure the movie continues to be given time after it is opened using the play command. Fixes a problem where the movie would start playing and then stop. 

Fixed a cosmetic problem with changing the movie controller size (show controller, set scale) where the new area showed as white and was not drawn in by QuickTime. 

If the movie's 'play selection only' property is true, close/quit when done now works when the end of the selection is reached. 

The select command now automatically sets the time to the same value as the start of the selection. 

Fixed a bug that kept the scripts menu from appearing if the application was started up in the background. 

Moviewer 1.0a2

Changed the terminology of the select command from "select at <time> for <duration>" to "select at <time> duration <duration>". That's because the "for" keyword was changing to "duration" whenever the script was recompiled. The alternative is to change the keyword used in the Apple Event to something other than keyAEDuration. I felt that changing the terminology was safer. 

Fixed the play command to default playing to true. 

Fixed the code for setting the window style property to work on open windows. 

Fixed the code to keep track of whether the movie is playing when the window style is changed, so changing the window style doesn't abruptly cause the movie to start or stop playing. 

Added a dimensions property that returns the width and height of a movie. There were a couple of ways I could have implemented the property, so I guessed that it should be the current actual size of the movie but not including the controller (the play bar). Alternatives are to return the "natural size" of the movie, which is the size it has when not scaled, or to return the current size of the controller, which includes the movie. I'd appreciate feedback as to whether I made the appropriate choice, and whether I should also add "natural size" and "controller size" properties. Also, I chose to make the dimensions property read-only. It really could be read-write, but I think the movie looks better and plays faster if its size is set only via the movie size property. 

The file path can be obtained using "get the name of file 1 of <movie>". This was already a feature but it's not obvious, so I checked and it really does seem to work. 

Moviewer 1.0a1

Corrected window scale terminology. 

Added a "play selection only" property. 

Fixed a bug that caused a crash when disposing of a window that failed to open because there was not enough memory. 

Increased the memory reserve so the application is much less likely to crash when it is low on memory. 

Removed some unused classes from the terminology. 

Install minimal menus (no editing or saving) if QuickTime is not registered. 

Accept cut/copy/paste/clear Apple Events only if QuickTime is registered. 

The application recognizes many movie properties and commands and forwards them to movie 1 by default if no movie is specified. 

--