CompuServe Messages

Gary, I don't think you can call Quicktime 2.0 an application. Quicktime is a computer video standard proposed by Apple that uses a group of codecs and can adapt the quality of the playback in order to mantain the speed. It is moreless like Video for Windows, except that Video for Windows is rude and primitive, specially compared to the second generation of Quicktime. QT 2.0 let you run 30fps 320×240 video and 15fps 640×480 on any Macintosh. I personally get full 30fps in full screen mode in my PowerMac (QT is optimized for the PowerPC) and 10 to 15fps in resolutions bigger than 640×480. The quality (again in my powermac) is impressive. I also have a new Quadra 630 and a Performa 550 (both really impressive and _cheap_ machines) that I have bought for my father and sister respectively (its xmas time! <g>), and I can tell you that the quality of the playback is _a lot_ better than my Pentium with Ultima PCI running vfw at the same resolution. I don't know what apple does to its machines and software, but whatever it is, I makes the impression that the Quadra is a lot faster than the Pentium in any multimedia title (I have a few duplicated -Encarta, Myst…) that involves video. I don't know what is the performance of QT 2.0 on MPC2 machines, but on my PowerMac, you can record to fullscreen video to create REALLY nice previews without the help of any specialized compression board. I don't know if this is true for MPC2 boxes. Most probably not, because the PowerMacs are really optimized in this arena (not like the PCs, which are mainly optimized to run Excel -sorry about that <g>) Well (hehe), getting back to QT2.0, what is announced in CGW is probably the toolkit with the player and the extensions needed in Windows to use QT, the same way you use VFW. If you have Myst, you already have QT for Windows, because Myst comes with the code that let it run its QT movie. However, that's QT 1.1 and won't let you include it into your own applications. Your best bet is to GO APPLE and to their information library, where you will find a full description of what the QT2.0 package includes in its Windoze incarnation. I guess that most of it must be libraries and programming stuff. MPC 2 is not other thing that Multimedia PC 2, a "standard" (ha!) that defines what a multimedia PC has to have in order to run titles that have the MPC2 logo. It is something that mainly was promoted by MS and some hardware manufacturers. DCI is the new Windoze graphics standard. I am not to aware about what exactly it is, but it is supposed to replace the sloooooow graphics engine in Windoze. It includes support for 3D and lots of fancy stuff. The best example you can find about how it can be used is in DOOM for Windoze, which makes intensive use of the new graphics libraries or whatever they are call, that mainly have been developed for gaming stuff and programs that require fast sprites and 3D inside Chicago. I think Intel is also behind it or part of it. To be honest, again, your best bet is to consult someone from MS about this. It is all Win95 stuff and I don't have any interest about it. Maybe someone in the forum knows about this and can give you a detailed technical explanation.