If you plan to have QuickTime movies available on your server, then you should consider flattenMooV as a necessary tool for your software toolbox.
If you plan to have QuickTime movies available on your server, then you should consider flattenMooV as a necessary tool for your software toolbox.
Everybody knows that QuickTime movies are relatively large files. Unfortunately, compressing QuickTime movies does not accomplish very much since they have already been compressed using the QuickTime technology itself. It makes even less sense to encode QuickTime movies into a BinHex documents since that will make the files even larger than they already are. Consequently, to preserve the movie's contents you will have to configure your server to deliver QuickTime movies as BINARY files.
To complicate matters, MacHTTP (and WebSTAR) only serve the data fork portion of any given file. QuickTime movies contain a resource called "moov" in their resource fork necessary for any QuickTime movie to play. This is where flattenMooV comes in. flattenMooV copies and duplicates the moov resource of QuickTime files into the movie's data fork. If applied to the movies you deliver through your server, your QuickTime movies will contain all the information necessary for playback in the data fork, and your movies will be playable. Furthermore, if you intend Windows-based platforms to be able to play your movies, then flattenMooV is even more necessary since the Windows-based platforms can not interpret the resource/data fork construct at all.
Understanding all this technical jargon is not necessary for actually using flattenMoov. Knowing that you need to "flatten" your movies is.
To use flattenMoov, launch it, select a QuickTime movie file, confirm that the selected file is the movie you want to "flatten", give the movie a new name, and click the Save button. Now your movies will be deliverable through your server.
flattenMooV works flawlessly.
Eric last edited this page on September 26, 1995. Please feel free to send comments.