Thursday, February 12, 2004

Woah! I just discovered that if I use Firefox 0.8 to edit my Radio page I get this fancy little WYSIWYG editor instead of a plain old text box like in Safari. Looks like I have a new editor for my posts! 10:44:55 PM    comment []

Can't stop me now I started putting the XCode project together tonight, modeling it from the ElectricImage sample from Apple. Setting up the project is kind of tricky since there isn't any clear documentation. There are also several methods allowed that will result in the correct component package. According to TN2012 you can do it as a Carbon Bundle or as a Dynamic Library. It looked odd to me, so I just created an Empty Project and then added a New Target and chose the Legacy Bundle type. I don't know if this is correct, but it looks good so far. First thing I did was go in and click on the target to edit its settings. I changed the "wrapper extension" from bundle to component. Next I created a Frameworks group within the project and added Carbon.framework, CoreServices.framework, CoreAudio.framework and QuickTime.framework. I know I'll eventually need all of them. Last, I started copying the EI_MovieImport and EI_ImageDecompressor directories from the ElectricImage sample. I also copied the ImportExampleLinkedMachO.r file into my project directory. I'll rename these files and start editing them to use a new name like FLAC_Codec. Better yet, I'll call it codec_skeleton for the next step. What I think I'll do now is create the bare bones necessary to do a successful MovieImport and call out to the Codec. When it compiles fine and shows up in QuickTime successfully then I'll know it worked correctly. I'll save it off and start again with FLAC_Codec as my project. That way if someone else wants to get started on building a new QT Component they won't have to go through all the extra effort and can start off with a skeleton component framework. 10:27:53 PM    comment []

On the road again Got an email from the great Steve Nicolai, author of the OggVorbis QT component. He answered the question(s) I posed yesterday and has set me on the right track. In summary, the sequence of development should be: 1. Create a basic Movie Importer. This should be capable of reading in the FLAC file based on either filetype or filename extension. Upon successful import, QT should display the correct format name, time sequence, etc. 2. Write the decompressor that corresponds to the format specified by the MovieImporter. This allows QT to hand-off the imported file to the correct codec for the next step in processing. There's more detail than that, but I'm pressed for time so I'll add that detail in a separate post later. I'm a bit disappointed that I need to write an importer first, but at least this whole system is starting to make sense to me. 7:16:05 AM    comment []