Chapter 6: No, It’s Not Called iQuickTime

In This Chapter

Viewing movies

Listening to audio

Converting media to different formats

Keeping track of your favorite media

Tweaking QuickTime preferences

QuickTime is a set of exciting technologies that gives you access to the greatest multimedia experience around. Despite its power, don’t be surprised if you don’t even realize that you’re using it sometimes. Built with the average Joe in mind, QuickTime Player takes multimedia to new heights without forcing its users to become rocket scientists in the process.

QuickTime Can Do That?

QuickTime was created by Apple to perform all sorts of multimedia functions. Although normally associated with movie playback, QuickTime Player can do much more. Whether it’s playing movies, audio, animation, or music, QuickTime acts as the main engine that drives all your multimedia needs. (It’s even behind-the-scenes when Mountain Lion displays images on your screen.)

Media player: QuickTime Player’s main claim to fame is playing all sorts of media — and I do mean all sorts. Table 6-1 lists the most popular of the media types that QuickTime can play.

The real beauty of QuickTime Player is that it transparently handles playback of all these media formats and more. You don’t even really have to know what each of these formats is to play them. QuickTime Player takes care of that for you.

Internet media tool: When it comes to using media from the Internet, QuickTime is in a league all its own. In addition to playing the usual movies and audio files found on the web, QuickTime can play (or display) 3-D scenes and animations. As if that weren’t enough, QuickTime even lets you interact with some media. For example, with QuickTime, you can navigate within 3-D worlds or play Flash games.

Table 6-1 QuickTime Playback Formats

Media Type	File Types
Movie	MOV*, AVI*, MPG, DV, MP4, 3G (cellphones), H.263, H.264
Audio	AIFF, WAV, MP3, AU, SFIL, AAC, AMR
Image	JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, BMP, PCX, TGA
Music	MID, KAR
3-D	QTVR (QuickTime Virtual Reality)
Animation	SWF
*Movies in MOV and AVI formats use a wide range of compression schemes, many of them proprietary. For this reason, QuickTime might not be able to play some MOV or AVI movies that you download without the installation of a plug-in (called a “codec”) for that scheme.

Playing Media with QuickTime

QuickTime makes a world of movies, audio, graphics, and music instantly available to you. Whether you want to view professional movie trailers or listen to a garage band’s new single, QuickTime faithfully reproduces nearly any media format that you feed it.

To launch QuickTime Player, double-click its icon in the Finder, or click the Launchpad icon on the Dock and then click the QuickTime Player icon that appears. You can also launch QuickTime Player from the Finder by double-clicking a media file that QuickTime can play. (See Table 6-1 for a listing of these file types.)

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that QuickTime and QuickTime Player are the same thing: QuickTime is a technology that hides in the background waiting for instructions to do something with media; QuickTime Player is an application that uses the QuickTime technologies. You’ll do recording, media conversions, playback, and editing with QuickTime Player. What you won’t see is the QuickTime technology in action behind the scenes.

You can also launch QuickTime Player from an oh-so-convenient Dock icon. For more on the Dock, read Book II, Chapter 2.

Opening QuickTime movies

To begin viewing and hearing — aw, what the heck, how about absorbing — multimedia files, choose File⇒Open File from the QuickTime Player application. This isn’t the only way to open a file with QuickTime Player, though. Some of the other ways to open files with QuickTime Player are

Drag a file to the QuickTime Player icon on the Dock.

Right-click a movie and choose Open With; choose QuickTime Player from the pop-up menu.

Double-click the media file in the Finder.

Operating QuickTime Player

When you open a QuickTime file, QuickTime Player creates a new window to display it. All QuickTime Player windows have some common features:

Close, Minimize, and Zoom controls: These three controls appear at the top-left corner of most windows in Mac OS X. You probably recognize them by their colors: red, yellow, and green, respectively.

Resizability: Drag any corner or side of the QuickTime Player window to resize its movie for playback. Hold Shift while dragging to break free from constrained resizing. If the document contains only sound media, the window grows or shrinks in a horizontal direction when you resize it.

Any resizing that you perform makes no changes to the original file. QuickTime provides it for your convenience during playback.

Although some window features are common to all QuickTime Player windows, many features depend on the type of media that you wish to play. Table 6-2 lists some of the window features that you might find and the media types associated with those features.

Table 6-2 QuickTime Player Window Features Based on Media

Window Feature	Media Type That Uses This Feature
Play button	All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI
Rewind button	All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI
Fast Forward	All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI
Timeline	All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI
Volume slider	All media with one or more audio tracks
Add to iTunes/Share	All media with audio or video
Toggle Full Screen	All movies and animations
Zoom buttons	QTVR 3-D media
Rotate buttons	QTVR 3-D media
Mute	All media with one or more audio tracks

To make your life easier, QuickTime does a lot of work for you behind the scenes each time that it opens a media file. Although you might think that there are different combinations of controls in QuickTime Player, the reality is that the various media windows are more similar than they are different. Figure 6-1 shows the location of various QuickTime Player controls.

Playing media

Playback begins as you might suspect — by clicking the Play button. While a file is playing, the Play button toggles to a Pause button. Click that button to pause playback, which toggles the button back to Play.

Clicking the buttons with double arrows on them advances the playback head at high speed in the direction of the arrows. (Click once to advance at 2x speed; click again to increase the speed.) If the file has audio in it, you hear the playback at high speed, which sounds like an episode of those helium-inhaling Chipmunks. (Remember? Meee, I waaant a hooola hooop.) Despite its comical sound, it’s helpful for quickly scanning through a file.

You can also advance through the file by dragging the playback head — an action called scrubbing — in either direction. Scrubbing is allowed while the file is playing or when it’s stopped. When you drag the playback head, however, you miss out on the high-speed sound and video that you would get if you used the buttons.

To adjust the volume of a movie, simply move the volume slider left or right. To mute the volume, click the speaker icon to the left of the volume slider.

You can control playback by using the keyboard as well. Table 6-3 summarizes the keyboard shortcuts for playback.

Sometimes you might want to play a piece of media more than once. In these situations, you need to loop the playback. To force a movie to loop, choose View⇒Loop or press +L. Press +L again to turn off looping.

Movie info

To see more information about the files that you’re playing, ask the expert: QuickTime Player. To view basic information about a movie, choose Window⇒Show Movie Inspector or press +I. The resulting window displays the following data:

Source: Location of the file

Format: Compressor and dimensions of the file

FPS: Preferred rate of playback in frames per second (fps), shown only for video

Data Size: Size of the file

Data Rate: Preferred rate of playback (in bits per second)

Current Time: Position of the playback head (in units of time)

Current Size: Actual movie dimensions

These bits and pieces of information are read-only — you can’t change them from the Movie Inspector window.