MediaProcessor and QuickTimeVR (QTVR) files

I have been working at creating "Thumbnails" of QuickTimeVR files and have been struggling a bit with a few things. Firstly, I AM able to generate a thumbnail of the very first frame that shows in the QuickTimeVR file. The size of the thumbnail that is extracted is exactly the same size (in my case 300H X 400W) as the initial view of the QuickTimeVR file if I were to open the QTVR in Apple's QuickTime Viewer.

Because we can zoom into a QuickTimeVR, the actual resolution of the image contained within the file is much larger than the initial 300x400 view. In fact, if you resize the QuickTime Viewer (Apple's Viewer) the image quality gets much better as the window is made larger.

This brings me to the issues that I'm having:

- When I open a QuickTimeVR file via the QTReader and look at the single frame it contains, the reported height and width of the frame is vertically large and horizontally small (most of my QTVR files report height/width of 1637px/528px). It seems very strange to see these values, as QTVR's are panoramics (width should be larger than height, right?) The code that I use to check this value is below:

using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(original))

{

QTReader reader = new QTReader(ms);

// If there are more than 1 frame, get the middle frame

Int32 index = reader.FrameCount / 2;

frame = reader.LoadFrame(index);

originalWidth = frame.Width;

originalHeight = frame.Height;

}

- Does the QTReader class not apply the idea of multiple frames to QTVR files? This would make sense to me, but shouldn't there be some other way to "rotate" the QTVR so that I can grab thumbnails from different positions in the panoramic?

- When I ask for a Thumbnail size as below:

Aurigma.GraphicsMill.Bitmap movieImage = new Aurigma.GraphicsMill.Bitmap();

frame.GetThumbnail(movieImage, 1000, 1000);

I can never get a thumbnail larger than the 300x400 size that the QTVR opens at initially in the Quicktime Viewer. Because QTVR's can be zoomed into -- and the actual stored image is of much higher resolution than 300x400 in my case, how can I generate a large Thumbnail? Just to clarify -- I want the largest "snapshot" of the QTVR that I can get -- the resolution of the Thumbnails created at 300x400 is really poor, even though I can resize the original QTVR in the Quicktime Viewer to a very large size with excellent resolution.

Am I missing the boat on the proper way to extract images from a QTVR, or is the MediaProcessor plug-in just not yet able to process QTVR files as extensively as I need?

Thanks for your help,

Steve

After running the following code:

using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream(original))
{

     QTReader reader = new QTReader(ms);
     Aurigma.GraphicsMill.Bitmap bmp = new Aurigma.GraphicsMill.Bitmap();

     // If there are more than 1 frame, get the middle frame
     Int32 index = reader.FrameCount / 2;
     frame = reader.LoadFrame(index);

     frame.GetBitmap(bmp);
     bmp.Save(@"c:\temp\qtvr.jpg");
}

Firstly, I DO NOT get a middle frame -- I get the very first "frame" of the QTVR. In fact, the following:

Int32 count = reader.FrameCount;

stores the value of 1 in "count"-- so there is only 1 frame in the QTVR.

The dimentions of qtvr.jpg are 400 Wide by 300 Tall

I have attached the Quicktime VR file

Thanks

Edited by user Tuesday, December 23, 2008 3:15:33 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

File Attachment(s):

qtvr_example.mov (6,921kb) downloaded 11 time(s).

Sorry for such a delayed response, but I have been out of my office for a few weeks. Thanks very much for taking time to look into this for me.

The 2nd issue that I had asked about is actually the more important issue -- Is it possible to get a larger thumbnail from the qtvr file? Currently, no matter what I have tried, I cannot get a thumbnail larger than 300x400. The thumbnail image at this size has poor image quality (just as the qtvr that opens at this size in the Apple Quicktime viewer does). As you notice when you open the QTVR in Quicktime and expand the Quicktime viewer, the image quality becomes much better, as it is not "squeezed" into a smaller window.

Is there some way to extract an image larger than 300x400 from the QTVR using Aurigma?

thanks