Intro

ET OSX is a list of useful tools for the MacOS X, most of which live in the Applications folder on my startup drive. It started as a 'what's on my Mac' page on my personal site but quickly evolved into a blog of its own. I'm trying to focus most on of the tiny but useful utilities that sometimes save you lots of trouble and effort, and to omit for the most part the list of big guns, that one normally uses on a daily basis. The list serves two purposes, lets me easily answer 'how do I do this on the Mac' questions asked by other users, and helps me remember answers to the same questions myself.

Nice Player and QTAmateur- small, feature packed freeware QT Pro alternatives

As of June 2007 Apple are still bundling each computer they ship with their QuickTime movie player that fails to do the most natural thing one would want from a movie player - play a movie or a list of movies using the full screen of the computer. For that Apple wants you to purchase the 'professional' version of their player, or QuickTime Pro. If you don't feel like it you can choose from a couple of alternatives - use other software Apple bundles with MacOS X such as FrontRow or iTunes or even Finder itself to view movies fullscreen (complete with subtitles curtsey of Perian as described here) or use one of the many other popular movie players available for MacOS X, like for example VLC or MPlayer (also discussed on this blog here and here). I'd like to focus your attention on two other media players that I recently discovered that do the job of saving you money for basic functionality plus a lot more.
NicePlayer is, as the name says, a nice little player for all your movies or other media. The minimalist interface was clearly designed with one thing in mind - watching movies. The few controls that pop up on the screen when you launch a movie fade away after a user-specified amount of time leaving you all the real estate you need to enjoy your movies. Nice Player is designed around QuickTime, so it plays all media QT can play (directly or through extra components) plus a lot more, available via NicePlayer's own plug-in architecture.
As of this writing NicePlayer is available as a free open source project licensed under the GPL by developers Robert Chin and Jay Tuley. Not-so-obvious features in the current 0.95 version include support for lots of non-native QT audio and video formats such as Ogg-Vorbis and Matroska, playlist, external-file subtitle support (with or without the help of Perian and many more.
QTAmateur (guess where that name comes from) is a small and simple player that can play back all content that QuickTime can plus it can transcode (re-code and then export) into every format supported by QuickTime. You can add a list of movies to QTAmateur, select the output format, and let it o its thing all night long. No fancy interface in this one, just plain old fullscreen playback.
QTAmateur is available for free from developer Michael Ash's website. AFAIK the source is not available, but recent posts on Michael's blog show that he is moving towards releasing the source code of at least some of his projects.

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