Last week I wrote a crude guide to how to write a QuickTime media link file. This is something you could make in QuickTime Player Pro and it provides a file that you can then use as a text link to put on your web page. Clicking the link has the effect of launching QuickTime Player, loading your movie, and if you set the preferences the right way, it will play full frame.
(The whole point of QuickTime Media Link files is so that you can provide a text link to play a QuickTime movie from, but in the usual way of such things in QuickTime it also lets you do quite a few other things too.)
So, as promised, here’s the next bit of information about qtl files. If you use a text editor to open the .qtl file that you generated using QuickTime Player you’ll see that it is just plain old xml:
<?quicktime type=”application/x-quicktime-media-link”?>
<embed
autoplay=”true”
controller=”true”
fullscreen=”normal”
kioskmode=”false”
loop=”false”
playeveryframe=”false”
quitwhendone=”true”
src=”urlofmovie.mp4″
type=”movie/quicktime”
volume=”100″
/>
What this means for practical (very practical) purposes is that instead of having to use QuickTime Player to generate your .qtl files you can just use this script. Substitute urlofmovie.mp4 for the url of the video that you want to play, and the above script, if written in a text editor and saved as .qtl will work just as well. That is seriously cool. It also makes it trivial for anyone to generate movies that play full screen (but don’t confuse full screen with ‘all of the screen’, full screen can mean that QuickTime player takes all of your screen, but still presents your movie in its original size – it’s up to you).
