Comparison of Multimedia Prowess - Director and Revolution

[Trevor DeVore]

On Oct 10, 2006, at 11:21 AM, GregSmith wrote:

> Trevor:
>
> Ideally, what I would like to make happen, but I don't think  
> Revolution
> provides the tools to do this, is to provide links inside one  
> QuickTime
> movie, while it is running, that will jump to a specific place in  
> another
> movie, and provide a link back to the jumping off point.  This is  
> probably
> only doable with a product like LiveStage Pro.  But, if something  
> outside
> the movie, Revolution-wise, could do the same thing, I'd settle for  
> that.

You have a couple of different options here.  The EnhancedQT  
external, which provides additional QT functionality in Rev, might be  
useful to you.  You can get it here <http://bluemangolearning.com/ 
developer/revolution/> and it is free.

It is possible to add Wired Sprites to your movies using LiveStage  
and program text to be sent to the hosting application (Revolution).   
Rev player objects (what you play QT movies in) receive the  
QTDebugStr message which you can send form LiveStage using DebugStr.

Using the EQT external you can also get these messages sent to a  
player object:

QTApplicationNumberAndString pNumber, pString
QTFSCommand pCommand, pArgument
QTStatusMsg pType, pMsg (pType can be "streaming","error" or "urllink")
QTMovieLoadState pState (see qtGetMovieLoadState documentation for  
possible values of pState)
QTHotSpotEnter pHotSpotID
QTHotSpotLeave pHotSpotID

I've used QTApplicationNumberAndString in the past since I can send  
two parameters as opposed to one.  Either way works since parsing  
text in Rev is such a snap.

So you could have a button that when clicked sent a command using  
DebugStr() that looked like this:

Command=GoToVideo
Name=VideName.mov

You could set up all sorts of commands similar to the above that Rev  
would process and use to navigate to other moveis.

Another option is to include the instructions in text tracks.  EQT  
has the qtRegisterTextSampleCallback command which allows you to  
specify a text track and a msg to be sent each time a new sample in  
the text track is loaded.  You could include instructions in the text  
tracks that would tell Rev to display a navigation button and  
instruct the button where to navigate to.  I would prefer this option  
since you could customize the buttons and user experience in Rev  
which is easier to author in than LiveStage Pro.

In the end, the basic idea is to come up with a system of commands  
that could instruct Rev what to do based on instructions coming from  
the movie being played.

-- 
Trevor DeVore
Blue Mango Learning Systems - www.bluemangolearning.com
trevor at bluemangolearning.com