QuickTime for Java: A Developer's Notebook

Chapter 6. Capture

Much of this book has assumed you already had media of some kind to play and edit—but where does this media come from in the first place? Digital media has to come from one of two places: either it’s completely synthetic or it’s captured from a real-world source. Capture, via devices like microphones and video cameras, is far more common.

The problem is that capture doesn’t officially work in QuickTime for Java. The problem dates back to Apple’s Java 1.4.1 rearchitecture, which broke QTJ and forced massive changes to the API in QTJ 6.1. One of the things that was not updated for QTJ was the ability to get an on-screen component from a SequenceGrabber, which is the QuickTime capture component. Instead, Apple just put a statement in the QTJ 6.1 documentation:

Although sequence grabbing is currently not supported in QuickTime for Java 1.4.1, it may be provided in future releases.

But if you think back to how the QTJ 6.1 situation was described in Chapter 1, you might recall that QTJ classes that didn’t require working with AWT—such as the quicktime.std classes that simply wrapped straight-C calls—were unaffected by the Java 1.4.1 changes and still worked. Given that, notice in the Javadoc the package called quicktime.std.sg, which contains the SequenceGrabber class among several others. Besides, capture, per se, doesn’t necessarily imply using the screen, so shouldn’t it still work?

The good news is that it does. In this chapter, I’ll introduce the parts of the capture ...