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QMedia is the plug-in that allows 4D applications to include, play back, edit and integrate tightly with all digital media types supported by QuickTime, Apple's award-winning, industry standard, multimedia technology. QMedia broadens the spectrum of applications that 4D developers can address by transforming 4th Dimension into a multimedia container and content development environment. Applications written with QMedia can be deployed accross platforms, as well as in heterogeneous client-server configurations.

For simple playback, try QMediaLight; it's a subset of QMedia dedicated to playback that offers a compact, fit-to-purpose command set and attractive pricing, while maintaining instant upgradeability to the full QMedia.

Here's some of what you can do with QMedia:

Embed multimedia in your forms

Play back in 4D forms or external windows all QuickTime-supported media (still images, standard movies, VR movies, animated GIFs, sounds, music, MIDI, MPEG on Mac, etc). Control the visibility of the movie area and of the movie controller (in whole or in parts). Detatch the movie from its controller, and place each independently inside the plug-in area. Configure the area for movie editing, looping, keystroke handling and drag and drop to the Macintosh desktop. With QMedia 1.5 you can also get audio metering information and display custom sound level indicators.

Handle user and QuickTime events

QMedia gives programmatic access to many user events and QuickTime events through callback methods. Trap specific event types, examine event-specific properties, take some action, and finally decide and tell QuickTime if it should handle the event or not. Some of the things you can do with event handlers are:

Trap mouse clicks. The user will not be able to start or stop the movie with the mouse.
Track the custom button of the movie controller. When the mouse moves over a hot spot in a VR movie, search the database for information related to the hot spot.
Track user navigation history in a multinode VR movie and use it to populate a popup menu. The user can go back to already visited nodes by selecting from the history popup menu.