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More Leopard Features Unveiled: Full-Screen QT, DVD Player, more
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google talk in iChat
I would like to see my google talk buddy list in the same buddy list as iChat and NOT a seperate buddylist window. Allow me to have them in one list please
I would like to see my google talk buddy list in the same buddy list as iChat and NOT a seperate buddylist window. Allow me to have them in one list please
the hd pane is there in tiger 10.4.9 so dont get too excited - this coincided with dvd studio pro having hd capabilities
People would find that it has an HD player through Boot Camp if nothing else, and be pissed that they have to wait. Anyway, people have been making use of Blu-Ray in Macs for a while, just not HD video playback...
What I'd like to see is better support in Quicktime for other video formats.
It'd be nice to be able to play *EVERYTHING* in one player, or through iTunes (which would enable playing stuff using the Apple Remote interface). xvid, wmv (though flip4mac helps here), avi, ogg theora, mkv, and so on.
And yes, I know there's codec packs that *supposedly* allow Quicktime to play these formats, but they don't work very well, or require you to "convert" the file first, or some other backassward way. It ends up being easier to just fire up VLC or MplayerOSX.
There's nothing to stop Apple from including codecs and demuxers for these formats in Quicktime; it's just pure laziness on their part. Being able to play all my video files in one place, import from all these formats into iMovie, and so on would definitely make Quicktime the killer app it can be.
But I somehow doubt it.
It'd be nice to be able to play *EVERYTHING* in one player, or through iTunes (which would enable playing stuff using the Apple Remote interface). xvid, wmv (though flip4mac helps here), avi, ogg theora, mkv, and so on.
And yes, I know there's codec packs that *supposedly* allow Quicktime to play these formats, but they don't work very well, or require you to "convert" the file first, or some other backassward way. It ends up being easier to just fire up VLC or MplayerOSX.
There's nothing to stop Apple from including codecs and demuxers for these formats in Quicktime; it's just pure laziness on their part. Being able to play all my video files in one place, import from all these formats into iMovie, and so on would definitely make Quicktime the killer app it can be.
But I somehow doubt it.
i find very few videos that QT (with XVid, DivX, AC3/A52 Flip4Mac, 3ivX, Perian, Ogg etc plugins) wont play. most problems are with WMV files, which VLC/MPlayer dont always play either.
i would like some better support, but Apple provides the functionality for plugins and codecs, and we have them, they just need to be improved. and given that MANY of the codecs are opensource, you're quite free to improve them yourself
Mail.app in 10.4 talks to the iChat Agent via Distributed Objects to get that information. It'd be fantastic if Apple would make this functionality open to 3rd party apps... I'll be very pleasantly surprised if the 'default IM client' does anything besides change registration for aim:// links and the like.
The iChat Agent Plugin for Adium lets Adium pretend to be the iChat Agent and thereby makes Adium's presence information work for Mail.app and Address Book... but having it installed means that iChat can't work at all.
No, it does almost sound like that from the wording, but it's actually much less exciting than that...
AppleInsider said:
Edit: I must be blind and didn't see the other 4 pages of this thread.
What's this thread doing here? It's not about the iPhone.
Yes this is quite a pleasant change to what has been going on around here.
Well, I suppose this means that now anyone with a mac can buy the xbox 360 HD DVD player and plug it into their mac and watch HD videos
As soon as it's confirmed by a developer, I'm getting one, they're cheap here
(cheaper than in the US and 1/5 of the price of a PS3).
QuickTime still does not support subtitling, which is annoying everywhere people speak any other language than english. How hard is it to embrace such a nice feature? For that reason, I'm forced to use "NicePlayer" instead.
Throw my name in with the "it's about freaking time" crowd with respect to the fullscreen quicktime news. I haven't used QT that much at all, as I immediately started using mplayer and then VLC (because QT was so lame). I find it embarrassing that you get nickle-and-dimed for a video player on a Mac of all platforms. Maybe they've finally seen the light, and will bundle QTpro and iLife in with every system now.
If they really wanted to sell some computers (don't you often wonder if Apple really does!?!) they'd release that spreadsheet they've had under wraps for the last 5 years and bundle a full iWork in with every system as well. That would get some marketshare! A computer that just does everything out of the box. You'd have to spend a grand on software for a PC to come even close. So what if it causes them to bump the price $30 or so on average across all the models, and bumps the semi-annual software upgrade "tax" to $150, you know it would be worth it!
If they really wanted to sell some computers (don't you often wonder if Apple really does!?!) they'd release that spreadsheet they've had under wraps for the last 5 years and bundle a full iWork in with every system as well. That would get some marketshare! A computer that just does everything out of the box. You'd have to spend a grand on software for a PC to come even close. So what if it causes them to bump the price $30 or so on average across all the models, and bumps the semi-annual software upgrade "tax" to $150, you know it would be worth it!
As soon as it's confirmed by a developer, I'm getting one, they're cheap here
Cant remember where i read it but someone tried this and although the drive was recognised and the disk showed on the desktop - it wouldnt play an HD disc
Actually, as filesystems go, and in appropriate context, ZFS definitely qualifies as revolutionary.
Now, the home user desktop (even the professional desktop and low-end server) market aren't really those contexts, because in those markets all contemporary filesystems are basically equivalent (although with a few improvements the story there would be different). However, for servers where storage is a significant part of their function, its features and ease of management definitely qualify as "revolutionary", IMHO.
OS X Server w/ZFS + X-RAID [+Xsan] could potentially be a great product in the low-end storage market - although it's more likely Sun will dominate with some Solaris-derived equivalent (to replace the 5320 and 5220 appliances).
i find very few videos that QT (with XVid, DivX, AC3/A52 Flip4Mac, 3ivX, Perian, Ogg etc plugins) wont play. most problems are with WMV files, which VLC/MPlayer dont always play either.
i would like some better support, but Apple provides the functionality for plugins and codecs, and we have them, they just need to be improved. and given that MANY of the codecs are opensource, you're quite free to improve them yourself
True, though you still need to employ a bit of a hack to, say, allow any of those files to be added to iTunes (reference movs), and the same hack to any device (Apple TV or other computers on the network) you'd want to share them on. Built-in support for these codecs could erase that problem.
Btw, I keep hearing about how QT Pro has all these codecs installed -- are they actually USEFUL codecs that real, normal people use and have heard of? Because if it's not Xvid, DivX, WMV or Flash it's useless.
I'd like to think that the fullscreen functionality in QT points to making the software into a more universal platform for media, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Apple's arrogant belief in supporting only a handful of "preferred" media formats is undiminished -- just look at the complete ******** that's going on with YouTube. "Oh, we won't support Flash video, we'll just have YouTube convert all 8 gazillion of their videos to our format! @ssholes. If that's their attitude towards big companies with the resources to convert that much video, where does that leave the consumer who wants to somehow put his DVD or ripped AVI collection on iTunes? Buy a second computer to run HandBrake for 2 years?
um. you DO realise that h.264 is an open standard, wheras flash is a closed, proprietary format. h.264 also gives much better quality with smaller file sizes.
if it wasnt obvious, you aren't apples "target" audience. do you REALLY think they would be able to sell movies on the itunes store if they also gave easy support to the major formats used for pirating movies??If that's their attitude towards big companies with the resources to convert that much video, where does that leave the consumer who wants to somehow put his DVD or ripped AVI collection on iTunes? Buy a second computer to run HandBrake for 2 years?
What? You mean.. I go into the store (not the iTunes online store, a real store) and grab Lost Season 2 (example), I get home and you're saying that I don't have the right to put the box away as new and rip the DVD's into AVI's to:
1: Avoid damaging the original case
2: Avoid damaging the original discs
3: Avoid having to open box/get dvd/close box/insert dvd/watch/eject dvd/put in box again everytime I want to watch an episode.
Apple should support AVI encoding, this is just one of the things that I just can't understand.
So, on one side Apple is going "iTunes Plus, NO MORE DRM!", on the other "You can't add AVI's to iTunes because they're pirated material!", makes no sense, mp3 is a "pirate" format too then.
What people make with their computers is no one's business, and acusing piracy for not supporting one of the most popular video formats is just ridiculous imo.
ripping a CD to MP3s is perfectly legal. ripping a DVD to ANY format is ONLY legal if the disc doesn't have encryption (ie, a non-commercial disk). "sure, you can make a copy if you want. but you aren't allowed to break the encryption. and you cant (technically) copy/rip the disc without breaking the encryption.
also. as for "no avi". it COULD be that apple decided its not worth the effort to properly support all various iterations of this 15 year old container format.
the advanced features of H.264/DivX/XVid are only possible in an AVI file through hacks.
also, if you ripped all your videos yourself, why in gods name would you choose AVI to rip to!?!?
ripping a CD to MP3s is perfectly legal. ripping a DVD to ANY format is ONLY legal if the disc doesn't have encryption (ie, a non-commercial disk). "sure, you can make a copy if you want. but you aren't allowed to break the encryption. and you cant (technically) copy/rip the disc without breaking the encryption.
also. as for "no avi". it COULD be that apple decided its not worth the effort to properly support all various iterations of this 15 year old container format.
the advanced features of H.264/DivX/XVid are only possible in an AVI file through hacks.
also, if you ripped all your videos yourself, why in gods name would you choose AVI to rip to!?!?
Look, I'm going to be 100% honest with you.
I follow the show Lost (I'm addicted..), but..., I live in Portugal, and usually the season that is airing in the USA and other countries only starts in my country when it's almost near the end there, and frankly, until the DVD's get in stores, I really don't have a schedule that allows me to be at home every wednesday night so I can watch it.
So... instead of having to wait for the DVD's (impossible for a true fan, lol) to watch the show I download the episodes in AVI format from "certain places" and follow the season in it's normal schedule, once the season is over, I wait for the DVD's and then I delete the files and buy the original discs (I'm a collector of certain shows, Lost being one of them.)
All this so I can reach my point, which is, when I get AVI files in my iMac I want them to be iTunes-ready (I'm an organization freak), so, I go into ffmpegx or any similar app and convert the videos to h.264 and believe me, side by side, with maximum quality compression, I still think the AVI has better quality, but hey, maybe that's me doing something wrong.
The thing is, I don't see which is the big deal with supporting AVI files, I really don't...
Still, if there's a logic reason... please give it to me!
But the thread is about Leopard, so... sorry if this was off-topic.
also, if you ripped all your videos yourself, why in gods name would you choose AVI to rip to!?!?
Actually, I'd settle for any decent format if ripping from DVDs was as clear-cut, error-free and guaranteed to work as ripping from a CD and could be done from within the iTunes interface. Like it or not, AVI is the most common format for this sort of thing, just as MP3 remains the most common format for audio despite being around since the Dark Ages and being technically inferior to AAC, WMV, etc. Just as the massive MP3 collections many consumers developed in the pre-iTunes days were later imported into iTunes as Apple's music platform became popular, so the massive AVI collections that have developed -- as with MP3s, through a combination of ripping and piracy -- over the past several years should also be importable.
Nonsense. They'd hardly have to write any code at all to "properly support" AVI and the related codecs; just buy or license the plugins that are out there already then make sure support for these formats are 'turned on' in their programs. It would not be the first time they've done that sort of thing.
I realize Apple may not have quite the same freedom to move in the DVD area because of the laws about breaking copy protection (of course, even this can be gotten around by allowing already-decrypted VIDEO_TS directories to be treated as first-class media files. DVD Player already does this; why not QuickTime or iTunes?). But there is absolutely nothing preventing them from at least supporting existing formats, besides the conviction that they can get away with it.
Um, who cares? The re-encoded videos aren't themselves going to look any better, and any file size savings will be relatively small, and a pittance in the broadband era (ok, maybe not so much a pittance on AT&T's network, *snicker*). The point isn't that one format is "better"; it's that they'd rather have them all converted than just support the existing format themselves. It's both a waste of time and resources, and evidence that they aren't at all interested in interoperability in the video realm, but rather in throwing their weight around. Can you imagine if they forced you to convert your music to AAC in order to work in iTunes? And don't give me this "open standard" stuff - technically, MP3 isn't entirely open either.
Obviously, but that doesn't make it any less ridiculous. iTunes could not have come as far as it has if they'd taken the "your current media is worthless" tack with music, and they won't succeed with video if everyone is forced to re-buy their entire collection.