QT Player only?

[Kurt Kaufman]

 >>>I guess I'm not grokking the difference between a player object and a
videoClip or how to even control a "vc".<<<

It might help to think of the player object as a "picture frame" of 
sorts; it uses services available to the operating system (such as 
QuickTime) to display images, video or sound.  The actual picture, 
video or sound file is "linked" to the player object but is kept 
external to the stack or standalone.
If you actually import the image, video or sound into the stack, it is 
displayed without the flexibility of the player (the controller for 
starting, pausing, playing only a selection, etc.), but in that case 
does not rely upon the presence of QuickTime or Windows Media Player, 
etc.  Also,  I understand in general it's good practice to keep 
external media sources separate from the project, especially if you 
want to update or change those resources.  I guess it wouldn't be as 
important if the resources were small in size (low-resolution images or 
short, compressed sounds, etc.).
I think that Runtime Revolution's authors are trying to encourage 
developers to use the player objects rather than importing media.  You 
certainly can display a much greater variety of file formats using the 
player object.

TIP:  If you are having difficulty playing a sound clip that you have 
imported, try importing the sound clip as a videoClip instead.

TIP:  I get all sorts of unpredictable results when setting the 
dontUseQT to true on Windows systems:  some MIDI files will play, but 
the sounds are out-of-phase with each other; some MIDI files and many 
sound files (AIFF compressed, some mp3s; even system WAV files) don't 
play at all;  so I would say that if you are not going to have QT 
available on the host platform, test, test, test!  (These results are 
using Win2K Pro, RR 1.1.1; it may be that some of the problems are 
corrected in RR v2.x)

-Kurt