It took somebody quite a lot of time to realize the impact of this but Apple have just released QuickTime 7.2 allowing for full screen movie playback without going for the pro version. You can get the latest version from AppleMenu->Software Update or from Apple's QT downloads page.
(via World of Apple)
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.
Problem: quicktime gives us great stuff like full-screen view through Front Row, AppleTV, browser integration and what not... but for most of us non-native English speakers subtitles are a must. Most of the popular video players out there like VLC or MPlayer support the viewing of subtitles along with the video content. Anybody who has ever played a XviD movie with Cyrillic(wikipedia.org) subtitles will tell you, that the process is far from double-click. Theoretically, Quick Time supports text tracks, but not anything like the popular .srt or .sub subtitle file formats.
Solution: While browsing through a long AppleTV related discussion last weekend I saw a post that promised built-in subtitles support for version 1.0. Turns out the guys that are behind the Perian project have the feature already working, but they are still not offering it for download. Well this got me interested and a couple of days later I had a QuickTime component that allows to watch XviD movies complete with .srt subtitles. Here's how you can also build one for yourself.
Requirements: Apple's Developer Tools, available for free from Apple's Developer Connection or the install disc of every Mac and Subversion, which is a version-control system. You can get background info on Subversion at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/, but I recommend installing the MacOS X packages available from http://www.codingmonkeys.de/mbo/. After installing the them you'll be able to download the programming code for the Perian project. Use the following command
[localhost:~] username% svn co http://svn.perian.org/trunk Perian
which will create a folder called perian and will download the source code for the whole project in it. Then double-click on Perian.xcodeproj which is the Xcode project file and if you've never used Apple's IDE follow these steps:
Locate the file Categories.m and double-click on it:
Now find the line that says something similar to:NSStringEncoding encodings[] = {NSUTF8StringEncoding, NSUnicodeStringEncoding, NSWindowsCP1252StringEncoding, NSWindowsCP1251StringEncoding};
This is the magic line, by re-ordering those items you set the preference for the encoding of your subtitle track. If you want to be able to view cyrillic subs, you change the line to:NSStringEncoding encodings[] = {NSWindowsCP1251StringEncoding, NSUTF8StringEncoding, NSUnicodeStringEncoding, NSWindowsCP1252StringEncoding};
Ok, we're almost ready. Now you need to set the build phase of the project to 'Deployment' like on the picture...
And now, build the project:
After a minute you can look into your Perian project folder, where you should have a new subfolder called 'build', inside which you should have 'Deployment' in which at last should be your brand new Perian.component!
Now you can copy it to /Library/QuickTime and immediately you'll be able to view XviD content complete with .srt subtitles! Just make sure you name the .srt file exactly the same as the XviD file and place both files in the same directory. Thats it!
Note: If you previously had Perian installed, play it safe, move the component file somewhere, log out and log back into Finder before installing your new version.
Update: As already noted elsewhere on this site the good folks from the perian dev team have now shipped version 1.0 with complete subtitle support an language recognition. Means you no-longer need to play with svn if you don't want to. Just grab your pre-built copy from perian.org
Project Perian (perian.org) enables you to easily watch many popular, but officially unsupported video file formats in QuickTime Player. Ambitiously dubbed 'the swiss-army knife for QuickTime', Perian consists of a couple of QT component files, that allow you to use DivX, XviD, .avi, .flv and what not with a little more than a double click. And what is more, XviD to iPod video conversion is just a compression away. Perian is free and open-source project that accepts donations through PayPal.
Update: Perian was updated around the end of June 2007 to version 1.0. It now officially supports lots and lots of audio and video codecs and file formats as well as transparent subtitle support (.srt and ssa) with great language and encoding recognition. Means it can play your subtitles without you having to set any kind of language preferences ;-) Grab your copy from the Perian downloads page and have fun!
VLC (www.videolan.org) a multi-platform video player which started as a student project, but currently is one of the most popular video players out there. It is more of a streaming solution than just a player (started as a client-server project), very nice user interface Current version has better support for cyrillic subtitles than mplayer which is enough for me. VLC is an actively developed opensource project which accepts contributions and donations.
MPlayer OSX (www.mplayerhq.hu) - an OS X port of the popular Movie Player for Linux. The port is now integrated into the original project. It has nice features such as on-screen display, multi encoding subtitles and supports quite a lot of movie formats. Opensource project, published under the GPL2.
HandBrake (handbrake.m0k.org) - your one stop solution to create an iPod movie from any DVD-like source (dvd disc, image file, VIDEO_TS folder...). You can control the size, quality and bitrate of the resulting MPEG4 movie as well as decide which language track and subtitle (cyrillics work ok) language to include and which not. Handbrake is licensed under the GPL and apart from MacOS X the home page quotes compatibility with Linux and Windows.
Gawker (gawker.sourceforge.net) - tiny utility that can create time-lapse movies using your webcam/iSight (maccam compatible). More than this,it lets you connect to other shared cameras over the net and potentially create a movie of up to 4 camera sources. Gawker is licensed under the GPL and accepts donations via PayPal.
Flip4Mac (www.flip4mac.com) - this is a solution that is required for easy integration of numerous format encoded .wmv and .avi files, it other words, all those movies your PC-owning friend can play and you normally can't. It is brought to you by the nice folks at Telestream, Inc. and they also give you the opportunity to purchase WMV Player Pro (allows for re-encoding in QuickTime formats) as well as several other pro-video oriented tools.
EyeTV (www.elgato.com) is ElGato's TV recording software. Very well integrated with the OS. Commercial license, but available as a bundle with different TV tuner devices, both from ElGato and from 3rd parties. Unfortunately in Bulgaria you don't get online tv schedule services, so for me half of the functionality of EyeTV is lost.
DVD2one (www.dvd2one.com) is a tool that can help you when you want to do a quick copy of an entire DVD. Quick, friendly interface allows you to fit all the original content of a disc into a single DVD-R by re-compressing it on the fly. Available both for MacOS X and Windows. Commerical license.
