Quickmotion User's Guide

About QuickMotion
QuickMotion is an OS/2 Multimedia component that plays QuickTime, QuickTime VR (QuickMotion 2.0 and higher) and Windows-style AVI movies.

QuickMotion works under the expandable OS/2 Multimedia architecture. With QuickMotion, any native OS/2 application that can play OS/2-style AVI movies can also play QuickTime movies and Windows-style AVI movies.

Some examples of native OS/2 movie applications are the Workplace Shell components that appear in the Open As... menu for movie files, Video In, the QuickFlick movie player applications and the QuickFlick plugin for Netscape.

How To Use QuickMotion
QuickMotion integrates seamlessly with OS/2 multimedia, and works behind the scenes to add playback support for a great many types of QuickTime and Windows-style AVI movies. To use QuickMotion, simply open the movie using your 32-bit OS/2 Multimedia application of choice.

When you choose Open... in some applications, they may list only *.AVI files. Remove the *.AVI selection in order to list all files, including QuickTime movies.

How To Use QuickFlick
QuickFlick is a native OS/2 movie player component for QuickTime and QuickTime VR movies. It is both a stand-alone application in your QuickMotion folder, and a plugin which is used by Netscape to handle QuickTime and QuickTime VR movies.

Q. How do I control a QuickTime VR movie?

A. QuickFlick's controls take advantage of the PC's two mouse buttons, so they do not match those of the QuickTime plugins available for the Macintosh and Windows.

The default is spin mode:

Click on mouse button 2 and drag vertically for continuous zoom (works in panoramas only).

To invoke grab mode, hold down shift before clicking mouse button 1. In grab mode, vertical and horizontal motion follow your mouse movement.

When the pointer is over a hot spot, it changes to a pointing hand. Click to follow the hot spot to another node in the movie or another web site.

Right-click in the movie window for additional options (Save As..., Save Frame As..., Copy Frame, Turn Left 90, Turn Right 90, Turn Around 180).

Keyboard commands are:

Q. How do I know that the QuickFlick plugin is installed and enabled?

A. Choose Help->About Plug-ins. If you see QuickFlick there, it is properly installed in the PLUGINS directory. If the Enabled box reads Yes, then QuickFlick will be used for processing all files with an extension of .mov. QuickFlick will be enabled if its filename ("NPQKFL.DLL") is alphabetically after any other plugins that can process .mov files (yes, that's how Navigator handles this).

Q. What are the properties I can set ?

A. QuickFlick's configurable properties, which you can set from the Properties menu choice or the Netscape about:plugins page, are:
 * Show First Frame ASAP
 * Non-Embedded Movies
 * Save

Q. Why can't I play some movies until they are completely downloaded in Netscape?

A. There are streamable and non-streamable QuickTime movies. Non-streamable movies have all of the header information at the end of the movie, so they can't be played until the whole thing is downloaded. Movies that were created before people thought it might be interesting to put them on the Internet are non-streamable.

If a movie is streamable, an indicator mark will appear somewhere along the download progress indicator soon after the download starts. The indicator mark shows when playback can (and will, if autoplay=true is specified by the web page designer) begin without fear of playing to the end before all the data arrives. The indicator mark may move as the estimate changes with changing download speed.

Check out the [Digigami page] for a graphic demonstration of the difference between streamable and non-streamable movies.

Macintosh utilities like Internet Movie Tool and MovieScreamer will convert non-streamable movies into streamable ones. We are considering making a similar tool available for OS/2. Contact us if you are a webmaster with movies you need to convert.

Q. I loaded a QuickTime VR object/panorama, and it doesn't work quite right.

A. Upgrade to QuickMotion 2.0 for QuickTime VR support.

Performance Tips
All of these tips apply to OS/2 Multimedia in general, because QuickMotion becomes an integral multimedia component.

Tuning
If you have more than 8MB of memory (and who doesn't these days), you will want to tune the multimedia subsystem to take advantage of it. Add the following to your CONFIG.SYS:

SET MMSTREAM=/S:64 /P:32 /H:256 /Q:1024 /E:1024 REM This statement increases the streams, maximum REM processes, heap space, queue size and event REM space for the sync/stream manager, which REM allows more movies to be open at once and may REM improve performance. SET MMBUF=49152 REM This increases the size of the read buffer. REM The default is 32768. It can be set even higher, REM but movies will take longer to load.

Note: Warp's FLI/FLC movie support appears to be sensitive to the MMBUF variable, and changing it may cause problems with FLI/FLC movies.

Sound Cards
/B:2 or /B:1 DEVICE=...\SBxxxxxx.SYS
 * If you have a SoundBlaster, try using
 * For ESS cards, make sure you have the latest driver.
 * For Gravis cards, get the latest version of the Manley driver.
 * MWAVE owners have reported problems with the wider range of sampling rates that QuickTime audio uses. It couldn't hurt to ask IBM to fix this.
 * PAS users have reported success with this version of MVPRODD.SYS. However, this version does not work as well with VoiceType.

Video Adapters
SET VIDEO_APERTURE=A00 REM Video optimization for PCI bus system SET VIDEO_APERTURE=78 REM Video optimization for VL bus system SET VIDEO_APERTURE=3C REM Video optimization for EISA bus system SET VIDEO_APERTURE=E REM Video optimization for ISA-Bus System REM (RAM + VRAM must be <= 16MB)
 * For all video adapters, if you are experiencing dropped frames, you may be able to improve the performance of your video display subsystem by moving the video aperture. Try adding one of the following lines to your CONFIG.SYS (select the line appropriate for your system):


 * For Matrox video adapters, get the latest driver and the DIVE fix [59K].

QuickTime
Some aspects of the QuickTime architecture are not yet supported by OS/2 Multimedia, and therefore are not currently supported by QuickMotion. Also, some of the features added in later versions of QuickTime are not yet supported by QuickMotion. These are
 * Recording. At this time, QuickMotion is playback-only.
 * Changing frame rate. QuickMotion plays QuickTime movies at the average frame rate for the movie.
 * More than 2 tracks. QuickMotion supports at most one video and one sound track.
 * Edits. QuickMotion plays the entire media contained in a track.
 * Multiple decompression methods. QuickMotion supports one video and one audio decompression method per track.
 * QTVR 2.0 (QuickMotion 2.0 supports the current standard, QTVR 1.0)

Acknowledgements
QuickTime is a registered trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.

OS/2 is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation.

You-know-what is a registered trademark of you-know-who.

QuickMotion for OS/2 is based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group, version 6.

Our sincerest thanks to all of our beta testers, and particularly to Gail Zimmerman and Darryl Sperber for being much better beta testers than we deserved to have without paying them.