QuickTime is more than a movie player - it is a complete media API. It has an installed base of over 100 million and is a mature, well maintained framework. This means that it has an extremely stable codebase and is widely deployed and tested on a variety of machines. Secondly it provides quality support for different media formats. You will find that many other technologies list a large number of media formats but provide only token support for each of them

When installing or updating QuickTime you'll need to select a 'full' or 'authoring' install.

ImageGlue is designed to work with QuickTime 4.1.2 or later. We recommend using QuickTime 5.0 or later as it contains optimizations for high speed processing of memory based images. Installing QuickTime on your server will make your applications faster, higher quality and more memory efficient.

Under some circumstances it may not be possible for you to install QuickTime on the server. ImageGlue will work in the absence of QuickTime but some features will not be available. Most notably,

• only the copy mode will be available when drawing
• movie file formats (e.g. AVI) will not be converted
• dithering will be disabled

If you would like more information on QuickTime the QuickTime Specification is a good starting point.