Cocoa® Programming for Mac OS® X For Dummies®

Chapter 16. Multimedia

In This Chapter

• Playing system sounds and audio files

• Building an audio player project

• Playing movies with Cocoa

• Loading and using dozens of other media formats

Working with text and creating files are useful functions for your applications, but they aren't always the most exciting functions. Multimedia, on the other hand, is exciting. Cocoa continues the long Macintosh tradition of providing high-quality multimedia features for you to use in your projects.

In this chapter, you discover how easy it is to add sophisticated multimedia features to your applications. First, you explore audio by creating a simple application that plays audio files from a number of sources. Then you delve into the real fun — movies! By building a movie player application, you see how easy it is to add dynamic QuickTime content to your Cocoa projects. By changing only one line of code, you also see how to (dis)play many other kinds of media beyond QuickTime movies.

Listening to Audio

The Macintosh has long been a popular machine with audio aficionados. Cocoa continues in this tradition, offering a complete set of tools for producing audio with your own applications. Some of the possibilities that Cocoa offers are

• Playing sounds that reside in your application's bundle

• Playing sounds that reside in the Mac OS X System folder

• Playing sounds from anywhere on your hard drive

Besides playing audio files that reside in a variety of locations, Cocoa can play many different audio file formats. In the ...