Mac OS® X Leopard™ Bible

Chapter 7. Working with QuickTime and Included Media Applications

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Playing QuickTime movies

• Configuring and updating QuickTime

• Watching streaming QuickTime media

• Making a QuickTime slideshow

• Understanding basic QuickTime movie editing

• Finding out what's in the iTunes Music Store

• Using iTunes

• Playing with Front Row

The beginnings of QuickTime were understandably humble, with the first version focusing mainly on providing the ability to watch small, jumpy videos in a "player" window on your Mac.

Sixteen years later QuickTime is now the foundation of the amazing multimedia capabilities of Mac OS X and a widely used cross-platform Internet file format standard. Thanks to QuickTime, you can use your Mac as an audio jukebox with the iTunes application, buy music online with the iTunes Music Store, and take it with you in your iPod. You can store and work with the images from your digital camera with iPhoto. You can take raw digital videos from your camcorder and convert them into edited, polished home movies with iMovie. And you can take photos from iPhoto and movies from iMovie and save them on an impressive, slick-looking DVD, with the iDVD application (and an Apple SuperDrive). Using GarageBand you can record your own music using a line-level input or compose your own songs with the included audio loops. QuickTime is at the center of GarageBand's ability to use MIDI instruments and to record and play back sound.

These five applications—iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand—are ...