ThingLister

QuickTime is complicated and vast enough to be available as a different sets of components ranging from 'minimal' to 'full'. Likely as not, that weird confection of track types and features you're wiring into your movie is not present in the minimal install (which most users have).

Hitting your movie without these components should result in QuickTime offering to download them, which might not be the most convenient thing in the world when you're also trying to show your .MOV.

In fact, after running the updater, the user will typically be required to reload the page that instigated it in order to see your fab content. Are your users able to make that synaptic leap? More importantly: Will they bother?

To alleviate this pain, since QuickTime 6.0, Apple has offered the 'preflighter' XML type which might look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<?quicktime type="application/x-qtpreflight"?>
<qtpreflight>
<component type="eat " subtype="TEXT"/>
</qtpreflight>

Here we see a preflighter for the text importer component. You can add whatever others you like as child elements to the <qtpreflight> tag. If you save this as .XML, import into QuickTime player, then save as .MOV, you will be able to use the movie as a 'gateway' to your content, thus controlling exactly when the 'you haven't got this component' dialog appears.

Note the space in the "eat " parameter. All importer components use an "eat " type. (- and all exporters use "spit" type, but it's unlikely you need to worry about them for preflighting).

Problem is, how do we know what four letter 'thing' codes to put in the parameters for the component tags. You could try Unthinkable software's freeware utility 'thing reporter' or their IMNSHO slightly expensive 'thing detective', but neither of these will export the thing codes as a nice text list (Duh!). Apple doesn't provide a list, so I had to create one myself. I can't guarantee that it's accurate or complete, but it's surely better than a kick in the pants. I'd be particularly interested to have a list of which components are used by which features. (A luxury solution would be a droplet where you drop your QuickTime movie, and it generates a preflighter XML file based on the contents of that movie. I'd pay money for such a utility, but of course no such thing exists today).

Note, in order to create the list, I wrote an Applescript which makes use of Akua Sweets resource hacking features. I hope it was able to catch all the 'things' on my system, but there may be others I don't know about. The script is available here and will ONLY WORK ON OS9. If someone can dream up a way to write such a script for OSX, or just some utility that can do the job, I'd love to hear about it, but for now VIVA OS9!

UPDATE for OSX:

OK, so satimage ported their OSAX to OSX, which means we can now read resource files on that platform with Applescript. Great! Nice one Emmanuel! I have changed the script so that it uses the Satimage OSAX and made a couple of other OSX - specific changes to find the resources in the correct location. (Different from OS9 - and inside packages too, just to be an extra nuisance).

So, the upshot is that now I have an OSX version of my thinglister script. Don't forget to install the OSAX before running the script, and while you're at it, download a copy of Smile, which is a superb freeware Applescript editor from the same company.

In the html code for the table below, I have tried to use a non-breaking space everywhere a space is required such as "eat ". I don't know if this will survive if you just save this page as text from your browser. Suffice to say that in most cases, if there is a space in the 'four letter code' then it is found at the end of the code. i.e. if your 'four letter code' appears to have only three letters, there's almost certainly a space missing.

If you want to download the OS9 list shown below as a (stuffit compressed) text file, click here.