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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's still some confusion as to whether the QuickTime X Player will play QuickTime VR. I'm still waiting for my copy of 10.6, so can't verify. Anyone?
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.
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.
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.
Just cut to the chase and go to roughlydrafted.com for reams of Daniel's writing.
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.
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.
But take up screen for something that's not always needed?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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!
Actually, I should make the point that Microsoft's terminology on recycle bins (like Service Packs) is inconsistent. The problem is working on two levels of abstraction. The low level confuses the higher level because they are mixed. The concepts presented to the user are now confused and complex.
That IS the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple has worked hard (and achieved it very well from the first Mac on) to present a consistent high level interface and concepts to the user. Microsoft fails in this respect trying to appease the techie brigade by exposing low-level concepts. The mix of low level with high level abstractions is what really makes Windows so horrible. This is not a matter of hatred (as the original correspondent accused me of), but is a technical fact.
The mixture of LL and HL is fraught with difficulties, makes both levels inconsistent and the interplay between both makes for complexities that shouldn't be there.
Comments
You can install QuickTime 7x from the 10.6 Snow Leopard DVD. Just follow the instructions below:
...
Hope this helps.
This is article HT3678 on Apple's support site.
Indeed that did help. Thanks!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There's still some confusion as to whether the QuickTime X Player will play QuickTime VR. I'm still waiting for my copy of 10.6, so can't verify. Anyone?
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.
This IS like iMovie 08 all over again: ie, beta testing on consumers.
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.
However, Quicktime X refuses to play any MKV files, even when Perian is installed. =/
Has anyone ever been successful playing mkv files with quicktime? I always get choppy playback. Converting to mp4 seems to be the only alternative.
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.
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.
Just cut to the chase and go to roughlydrafted.com for reams of Daniel's writing.
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.
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.
But take up screen for something that's not always needed?
Whenever someone says it is just a service pack, just link this article:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews...-os-x-10-6.ars
I have now idea how a review of a service pack could span 23 pages.
? 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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!
Actually, I should make the point that Microsoft's terminology on recycle bins (like Service Packs) is inconsistent. The problem is working on two levels of abstraction. The low level confuses the higher level because they are mixed. The concepts presented to the user are now confused and complex.
That IS the difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple has worked hard (and achieved it very well from the first Mac on) to present a consistent high level interface and concepts to the user. Microsoft fails in this respect trying to appease the techie brigade by exposing low-level concepts. The mix of low level with high level abstractions is what really makes Windows so horrible. This is not a matter of hatred (as the original correspondent accused me of), but is a technical fact.
The mixture of LL and HL is fraught with difficulties, makes both levels inconsistent and the interplay between both makes for complexities that shouldn't be there.