Inside Mac OS X Snow Leopard: QuickTime X - Page 2

we have had that feature for a while now
and with video too

I was using Flip for Mac in order to play my WMVs. Are you telling me that WMV is supported natively in Quicktime X without the need for a plugin?

Hi. So, this is my first post to AI, but have read it everyday for years. I just don't feel like I have anything else to add. But, I noticed no one is mentioning about the author of this article's blog. It is terrific and has many of these type articles. Also, the comments section is typically filled with well thought out responses and perspectives. so, check it out.

it is roughlydrafted.com If you liked this short article, you will like his site. The only complaint I have is that he occasionally spreads some of the political brainwashing that has obviously occurred.

-rob
MBP, ATV, Iphone, Imac, airport extreme, ipods galore....you get the idea

I've installed Perian and it's fine, everything plays as I would expect. :-) I guess you know about it, but in case you don't.......VLC. I've used VLC for ages and not come across anything it can't handle, and it's freeware. :-)

You can install QuickTime 7x from the 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD. Just follow the instructions below:

1. Insert your Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Install DVD.
2. Open the Optional Installs folder and double-click "Optional Installs.mpkg".
3. Select the QuickTime 7 option and click Continue.
4. QuickTime Player 7 will be installed in your Utilities folder.

Hope this helps.

This is article HT3678 on Apple's support site.

I *REALLY* dislike Quicktime X.

Especially the controller be located on top of the image obscuring the picture. What is the point of that?

I have been generally very happy with SL but Quicktime X is a mess.

Very nice of you to be so helpful!!!

I had to upgrade to the latest Flip4Mac beta to get the WMV streams from my college website to play.

http://dynamic.telestream.net/downlo...acwmv-beta.asp

Yes. Audio and video preview was done in the "columns" view of Finder in Tiger. I think Leopard expanded it to more modes. Snow Leopard might have expanded the idea more, I don't know yet. I need to find a place to add a partition, buy the OS, more boring stuff, etc. Bah. I'll wait a bit.


The point is that it is supposed to auto hide unless you bump your cursor. This is not a new concept, iTunes & DVD Player did it and the EyeTV app did it too.

The terminology is a Microsoft hypocritical misnomer. Service Pack makes it sound like software is a physical entity that you need to service to keep it in good working condition, as in change oil in a car, or replace aircraft parts according to the service schedule. Software needs no such maintenance and the suggestion that a responsible user should apply service pack is nonsense. They are updates or patches.

The second bit of "rubbish" Microsoft terminology is "recycle bin". That implies that the file is somehow given another life as a usable artifact. Perhaps the bits and bytes are reused (otherwise what would be the point of throwing anything out), but bits and bytes are not the file - the file is a completely separate abstract entity. Put it in the trash or "recycle bin" empty it, and it's gone forever (in principle). The term "recycle bin" thus gives some false sense of safety to a dangerous place. Or maybe it gives the user some false satisfaction of having been "environmental".

Maybe we should start a list of Microsoft misnomers designed to conceal and mislead.

Microsoft thinks user-friendly design is having cutesy artifacts and terminology. It is not, having inaccurate and misleading terminology is in fact most user unfriendly. IBM was a case in point as well, having an acronym AMD for "Air Movement Device"... a three letter acronym for what anyone else would have called a three letter word - fan! Microsoft has certainly inherited this mantle of befuddling the average computer user with silly terminology.

Fred P. Brooks in Mythical Man Month points out the difference between 'program maintenance' and 'hardware maintentance' on p120. Clearly, the term 'service pack' is trying to make it sound like hardware maintenance.

Here's another article on "Software maintenance"

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1594861

This is a really great article, thanks AI.

However, I got to say that I'm really disappointed with QuickTime X. I really hope that Apple realizes how important the features of QuickTime 7 are to many of us. I wouldn't mind at all if Apple re-brands QuickTime 7 as QuickTime X Pro, even if they charged for it (but hope they don't).

The problem with the way it is now is that I'm afraid of Apple dropping support of QuickTime 7 or it's features. Another major problem comes from support. I now can't tell someone to do something that required QT Pro by simply upgrading...they have to install with the Snow Leopard disc. It's a hassle...and it's really hiding the functionality of QuickTime.

I was reading through this thread, and something hit me when I saw the mother with the kid recording themselves with quicktime. What if the iPod touch w/ camera, and iPhone are turned into external video cameras for the Mac or Apple TV? That could be pretty sweet.

My laptop starts to get heavy after hovering over our newborn for hours trying to give long distance relatives some face time. I suppose I could just hook up my video camera and set it on a tripod.

Whatever... I'm done.

With Leopard, just tap the space bar to play a song without launching quicktime or iTunes.

Please try and not confusing QuickTime with QuickTime Player in your articles. It appears misleading.

That's in Ubuntu since soooo long. You don't even have to click, but hoover the mouse is enough.

That "feature" is just plain silly. Talk with someone at your desk for a minute only to have them staring midway at your screen because you left the mouse hovering over a private (insert imagination here) video file or an obnoxious audio clip. If anything that "feature" is just something a developer threw in there because he/she could do so.

Application UI design is about the user experience.

Not related to the discussion but which LG Blu-Ray Disc player do you have, I always wanted one that could play mkv, h.264 encoded files too. Thanks.

Actually, I believe "Service Pack" originated with IBM as the term for a collection of PTFs (Program Temporary Fixes) distributed on what was affectionately known as the Cum' Tape. (Cum' being an abbreviation of cumulative.) I don't know if they have an official longer form of the term, but Service Pack is really short for something like Customer Service Package (of PTFs), so it's not really such a misnomer at all, just ignorantly misapplied to SL.

Your line of thinking seems too rigid, possibly blinded by your hatred. Sure, it's not really environmental, and it is on the politically correct side, but you are freeing up the storage for other uses, recycling the bits, just the media side, not the media contents. In the same way recycling paper doesn't save the information that is printed on them, just the raw materials. Seems to hold up to me.


I don't think it really falls apart there. You put something in a real recycle bin, once collected, that thing is gone forever as it was and will be reused in the form of another object. Once a Time Magazine (just an example) is recycled, you're not going to get that Time Magazine back, unless you retrieve it from the bin before it's collected. The principle seems to hold.

I'm not saying that Microsoft isn't taking the cheap way out, I wish they could do better than they've done, but parts of your argument just fall apart.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3771

Apple tells you how to use AppleTalk printers with Snow Leopard in the above Knowledge Base article. Just set up a print server and share the printer over a SL compatible protocol.

It's not new, but really only makes sense for full-screen video. Even DVD Player, which you mention, has a floating control window for controlling the playback of your movie when you aren't in full-screen mode.

Personally, I very much dislike it. I'd like to be able to see how far along I am in my video clip without having to move the mouse. And it's just plain poor interface design if you have to start moving your mouse before you know where you need to move it to. If I want to scrub through my video, first I have to move the mouse to see where the progress nub is, then I can move the mouse to the nub. It's like telling you to start driving and then I'll tell you where you what direction to go.

Sure it's only a minor annoyance, but it's an unnecessary one. Another example of "let's make it like the iPhone!" nonsense like the ultra-high glossy screens that got so much backlash.

PS: I also dislike that the close widgets on Safari tabs only show up when you hover your mouse over the tab. I guess I just like to see my target before trying to move the cursor to it. "Ready, Fire, Aim!" is never a good idea!

Indeed that did help. Thanks!

This agrees precisely with my reaction. I've never seen a video capable of filling the screen of my monitor when 1:1 bit mapping is applied, and I have no particular interest in making the video larger (i.e., filling the screen) given that it won't have any more detail.

But what I did find highly annoying was the control panel being on top of the image, even when the video frame was nowhere close to filling up the screen. This is just dumb, dumb, dumb. In addition to that, because the slider bar is so short, the granularity you have with respect to selecting a particular position in the video is limited by the screen granularity of that short slider. For a longer video, you end up not being able to set the play point to a granularity any finer than about a half minute, more or less depending on the length of the video.

It was just really, really dumb to put the control panel on top of the video, and it was just really, really dumb to make the slider as short as it is and make it so that it does not scale in width along with the video. When I see stuff like this, I can't help but wonder who was supposed to be watching the children. I found these things so annoying that I am now installing QT 7 in hopes that it will correct these very annoying shortcomings.

Note also that you still have to pay $20 extra to play MPEG2 video.

Which point? The poster, mrr, was making a point, and one that is valid. You can't seriously believe that it makes sense to defend the feature on the basis that it auto-hides. Given that it is placed over the video when you move the mouse, it had damned better auto-hide. But it is just annoying for several reasons, one of which is that you have to move the mouse to get it to appear, another of which is that when it does appear, it covers over a part of the video. It is simply a brain-dead design, thought up by some person who simply had their head shoved up their own you-know-what. Stuff that is slick and sexy is okay as long as it does not destroy functionality. As soon as any functionality at all is lost, then it is no longer a good thing. This is something that many younger programmers, especially programmers at Apple, just don't get. This is an inferior graphical user interface. You can't make the control panel stay present so that you don't have to move mouse; you can't position the control panel anywhere except over top of the video, and the slider is too short to allow fine granularity in selecting the play point. It is just plain dumb.

Why is it that you can't preview QT files within an icon located on the desktop, only an icon within a folder?

I agree that it can be annoying, but then, you're also talking about controls that don't actually need to be cluttering the screen all the time. It's a trade-off.

It's a poor trade-off, and unnecessary.
When video is full screen, it makes sense. Where else are the controls going to go?
But when the video is in a window -- even a pretty borderless QuickTime X window -- the controls can easily be placed outside the window. Perhaps under the window, like they've always been.

:d

Snow Leopard WILL play QuickTime VR, but QuickTime Player X does not do it, instead QuickTime Player 7 does.

When you double-click a QTVR movie, QuickTime Player (X) displays:



After accepting that, future double-clicks of QTVR movies go directly to QuickTime Player 7. There it looks identical to how it was in Leopard:



There are a number of factors that apply to this situation. QuickTime Player X is the poster child for the QTKit framework, which under Snow Leopard contains purely 64-bit code. 64-bit apps cannot host 32-bit plugins, so...

Anything requiring something from the 20 years worth of older QuickTime components are either passed to another 32-bit "server" process, for example, playing a movie using the Sorenson codec, or handed off entirely to another app, as in this case.

It's possible the VR renderer could be eventually rewritten in 64-bit code and included in the QTKit framework, but I can't imagine it's a high priority when there is so much else of 32-bit QuickTime APIs to bring in first.

So, the takeaway good news is that QuickTime VR still exists in Snow Leopard.


EDIT:

I should also mention, in case the above implies QuickTime Player 7 is the only way to view QTVR, that the fastest way to view a QuickTime VR .mov in Snow Leopard is to simply click on the file and tap space to invoke QuickLook.



QuickLook is invoked and the movie is instantly panable and zoomable (shift/control works just as it does in QuickTime Player). Also, the fullscreen button takes the VR fullscreen as you'd expect.

So, to emphasize, QuickTime Player 7 DOES NOT have to be installed on Snow Leopard to view QuickTime VR.

Even iPhone apps have Preferences. Why have Apple removed them from Quicktime? I want my files to play automatically when i open them, not when I hit the spacebar.

This IS like iMovie 08 all over again: ie, beta testing on consumers.

Am I mistaken in thinking that Jobs called Quicktime "X" and not "ten" during WWDC? If Jobs called it "EX," then this article is off to a misinformed start.

Personally, I can't find much use for QT X as a PLAYER. VLC and other players do a much better job with format (MKV) and codec (new and older) support.

Has anyone ever been successful playing mkv files with quicktime? I always get choppy playback. Converting to mp4 seems to be the only alternative.

I did a quick google search and according to some people the LG BD 370 (and 390) has mkv capability thru its USB port. Unfortunatelly from what I read the files must be no more than 4GB.

Another thing, The LG BD 370 has to be the European Version and NOT the US.

There you have it. You cannot insert a data DVD-R or DVD-RDL with mkv files in them and play them and you cannot attach a hard drive with all your mkv files to its USB Port.

Or, you know, don't.

Dilger is a shameless shill for Apple. According to him, everything they do is brilliant and without fault. He's never written a single critical word about them.

But take up screen for something that's not always needed?

That's 23 Web Pages each of which is several sides of A4.
When I printed it out it took up 42 Sides of A4,

But the print was too small So I had to up the font size and reprint it again
Then of course it got even longer.

The above is a great "Technical" review of Snow Leopard.
Quite a bit about some of the underlying "plumbing" in the system.

Anyone besides me notice that QT X can open Windows Media Files & Flash Video and flip4mac is no longer involved in rapidly transcoding WITHOUT the flip4mac watermark using all 8 cores simultaneously in no time at all?

Anyone else confused what direction Quicktimes now going in? The article talked about all the new features, but as Quicktime X is only on Snow Leopard unlike every other version of Quicktime and also every other media player, what exactly is the point of Quicktime now? If compatibility was a compatibility concern before that made developers use Flash instead, Apple have just made it ten times worse.

Sorry, I forgot to check back on this thread. My LG player is the BD390, and it plays MKV files that are larger than 4gb just fine. It says it can't do h.264, but I haven't had any trouble playing files encoded with that. It just pops up a message saying "you may have trouble playing this file", which I have not. It supports the multiple streams that MKV allows for, so you can switch between audio tracks and subtitle tracks. I highly recommend it.

Also, I have the US version of the BD390. It is region free and plays MKVs. It reads data files from DVDs as well. Your info is out of date.

No, you've still missed the point. The file as an abstraction is far removed from the bits it is stored on. It IS the FILE this operation applies to. The line of thinking is not rigid, just accurate. What should an end user care about the underlying technology their file is stored on? Microsoft continues to make people think at a low level in so many places. Like device ids c: d: h: are still around. This is primitive (and even was so in the 1970s!).

Since you miss and misrepresent my point... that is the point!

Let me restate it then. It doesn't actually matter what the label is. If you drop a paper into a trash bin or a recycle bin, once the Janitor empties it, you're not getting the information on that paper back again. It's gone either way, so the metaphor holds regardless of the name.

How is that really so difficult for you to understand?