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Disabling AVI Previews

C

coolsoldier

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 7, 2003
402
0
The 909
Is there any way to disable the QuickTime preview of .avi files in column view? QuickTime's compatibility with AVI's is absolutely appalling, and so every time I select an AVI in column view, it comes up with a dialog saying "QuickTime is missing software required to perform this operation. Unfortunately, it is not available on the QuickTime server".

I mostly use VLC to view AVI files, and I have VLC as the default program to open them, but the finder insists on trying to open the preview with QuickTime. Is there any way to turn off previewing for just AVI files, and if not, is there a way to disable previews altogether?
 
coolsoldier said:
Is there any way to disable the QuickTime preview of .avi files in column view? QuickTime's compatibility with AVI's is absolutely appalling, and so every time I select an AVI in column view, it comes up with a dialog saying "QuickTime is missing software required to perform this operation. Unfortunately, it is not available on the QuickTime server".

I mostly use VLC to view AVI files, and I have VLC as the default program to open them, but the finder insists on trying to open the preview with QuickTime. Is there any way to turn off previewing for just AVI files, and if not, is there a way to disable previews altogether?
Click to expand...
Download and install the DivX codec for QuickTime. Your problem will be solved.
 
pascalpp said:
here's a link to download the free divx codec:

Free DivX codec

(Note: i couldn't get the download form to work in Safari, but Firefox worked.)
Click to expand...

Thanks!

I didn't have any trouble downloading with Safari. With the plugin, QuickTime actually does a better job playing AVIs than VLC, and it makes the previews more tolerable (why doesn't Apple just bundle that plugin with the system?).

But if anyone knows how to actually turn the previews off, I'd still like to know.
 
coolsoldier said:
Thanks!

I didn't have any trouble downloading with Safari. With the plugin, QuickTime actually does a better job playing AVIs than VLC, and it makes the previews more tolerable (why doesn't Apple just bundle that plugin with the system?).

But if anyone knows how to actually turn the previews off, I'd still like to know.
Click to expand...
DivX is a version of Microsoft's draft specification of MPEG-4. The MPEG adopted a specification based on Apple's QuickTime instead. Now that you know that DivX is essentially the specification that lost the MPEG's adoption to Apple's MPEG-4 draft, you understand why Apple doesn't support this non-standard codec.
 
coolsoldier said:
Thanks!

...

But if anyone knows how to actually turn the previews off, I'd still like to know.
Click to expand...

panther has a little turnable arrow above the preview that i think stays whatever way you select most recently for all folders (although i may be wrong about that).

i assume you are talking about the preview in Column View.
 
dear lord

macfreek57 said:
panther has a little turnable arrow above the preview that i think stays whatever way you select most recently for all folders (although i may be wrong about that).

i assume you are talking about the preview in Column View.
Click to expand...

Obviously we're well aware of that little triangle.

We don't want to turn off the previews entirely. We want to turn them off for certain filetypes -- in particular AVI files that the Finder doesn't handle so well. (Even with the Quicktime plugins mentioned in this thread installed, the Finder is annoyingly slow in showing previews for these files. I'd rather it didn't bother. In my case, all the AVI files have an initial black frame so the preview is useless anyway.)
 
pascalpp said:
Obviously we're well aware of that little triangle.

We don't want to turn off the previews entirely. We want to turn them off for certain filetypes -- in particular AVI files that the Finder doesn't handle so well. (Even with the Quicktime plugins mentioned in this thread installed, the Finder is annoyingly slow in showing previews for these files. I'd rather it didn't bother. In my case, all the AVI files have an initial black frame so the preview is useless anyway.)
Click to expand...
I suppose you could resort to changing the creator and type codes, and removing the extension if you really hated the lag enough.

I tried that and it worked, but Quicksilver seemed intent on parsing the whole file for some reason afterwards.
 
Also, Perian. That doesn't have anything to do with disabling previews, but it has everything to do with gathering the appropriate codecs. Includes xvid, divx, and about a trillion others - as well as allowing for .srt subtitle playback. Oh, and it's free (the developers accept donations). I'll take Quicktime + Perian over VLC any day.
 
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