Technical information

74 Glossary
layer A mechanism for prioritizing the tracks in a movie or the overlapping of sprites.
When QuickTime plays a movie, it displays the movie’s images according to their layer-
images with lower layer numbers are displayed on top; images with higher layer
numbers may be obscured by images with lower layer numbers.
M3U file An audio metafile that’s created using a text editor and saved to a web server.
The file directs a user’s web browser to an MP3 playlist residing on the same web server
and opens the user’s MP3 player.
Mac OS X The latest version of the Apple operating system. Mac OS X combines the
reliability of UNIX with the ease of use of Macintosh.
Mac OS X Server An industrial-strength server platform that supports Mac, Windows,
UNIX, and Linux clients out of the box and provides a suite of scalable workgroup and
network services plus advanced remote management tools.
Manual Unicast A method for transmitting a live stream to a single QuickTime Player
client or to a computer running QTSS. An SDP file is usually created by the broadcaster
application and then must be manually sent to the viewer or streaming server.
MBONE Multicast backbone. A virtual network that supports IP multicasting. An
MBONE network uses the same physical media as the Internet, but is designed to
repackage multicast data packets so they appear to be unicast data packets.
MIDI Musical Instrument Digital Interface. A standard format for exchanging music
data and performance instructions among computers, synthesizers, and other
electronic music devices.
modifier track A track in a movie that modifies the data or presentation of other
tracks. For example, a “tween” track is a modifier track.
mount point In streaming, a string used to identify a live stream, which can be a
relayed movie stream, a nonrelayed movie stream, or an MP3 stream. Mount points
that describe live movie streams always end with a .sdp extension.
mov The Apple QuickTime movie file extension used to name both movie redirect files
and actual QuickTime media files.
movie A structure of time-based data that’s managed by QuickTime. A QuickTime
movie may contain sound, video, animation, or a combination of data types. A
QuickTime movie contains one or more tracks; each track represents a single data
stream in the movie.
MP3 MPEG layer 3. A popular format for compressing music.
MPEG-4 An ISO standard based on the QuickTime file format that defines multimedia
file and compression formats.