waffle

One of the most perplexing things about Snow Leopard has got to be what’s happening to QuickTime.

First, the unequivocally good stuff:

• QuickTime X is the next generation of QuickTime. It’s GPU-accelerated right down to (some of?) the decoders, it’s color corrected and the architecture is new and modern (by which I mean “not endlessly patched since 1991”). With any luck (and this is speculation), encoders could run via either Grand Central Dispatch or OpenCL and make good use of the multitude of cores, be they CPUs or GPUs.

• The new QuickTime Player supports screen video recording; far too long overdue. It also provides skimming and the oft-accompanied thumbnail timeline for when you trim.

• The QuickTime Pro witch is finally dead. No longer will you have to pay $29.99 — $0.99 more, I’m inclined to note, than Snow Leopard itself for those who upgrade from Leopard — on top of a $599+ computer just for the ability to convert movies.

Now the fun begins.

• The new QuickTime Player application comes with the ability to trim movies and “Share”/Export in three formats. Say what you will of QuickTime Pro, but you can at least maintain selections, copy back and forth and save in new formats. (If these features are still there in the new QuickTime Player, they haven’t been advertised, and I haven’t seen any evidence of them. The only playhead mode that obviously supports maintaining a selection is the one used for trimming. A screenshot of the File menu where the “New Player” command, which is useful only to create a movie from scratch in which to paste media, is gone, bears this out.)

  I guess you can make the case that for video editing, QuickTime Player always sucked, and that you’re hard pressed to find a Snow Leopard-capable machine that’s not got a usable version of iMovie on it, and that’s true, but sometimes you don’t want to start up iMovie just because you dare want to keep two non-consecutive portions of a movie in the same file.

• The way QuickTime works in Safari 4 is just plain weird.

  When you go to a standalone video file, Safari apparently special-cases the QuickTime plugin. (This may also be WebKit, but I haven’t been able to locate where this magic happens. It does not seem bound to QuickTime itself, since the last modified date of my WebKit QuickTime plugin is two weeks before I upgraded to Safari 4 proper.) You get an HTML page with a video tag, and the version of the QuickTime plugin that appears for this get the nifty disappearing play controls.

  However, on account of the video tag usage — check YouTube’s HTML5 test if you don’t believe me — the plugin area doesn’t display a context/right-click menu. The clicks fall through to the web page, which means that the two commands that exist to save the movie to disk in source or QuickTime format have vanished. You can’t use the menu button at the right edge, because that’s now gone, and you can’t use File → Save As… . What you can do, and what’s a horrible workaround, is find the source using the Web Inspector or the Resources window, copy the URL, open the Downloads window and paste. No step of this process is documented.

  The old-style plugins, by which I mean the NSAPI plugin and the ordinary WebKit plugin, both still carry support for saving movies, and both carry the menu button at the right end of the controls that could have been used in the other scenario to host these commands. Embedded non-video-tag: you can right click to save; otherwise: you can’t.

  Notably, saving movies from within the plugins and from QuickTime Player was one of the QuickTime Pro features.

  Update: This just got even more weird. I went to a direct link to an H.264 movie with the .mp4 file ending, and this time, I got the movie inserted via the embed element instead of the video element. My guess is that this didn’t transfer with the appropriate MIME type, video support was not triggered and it falls back to the regular plugin pipeline.

• Apple can’t throw away any part of QuickTime 7 yet; even the PowerPC pieces need to run in Snow Leopard under Rosetta. This means that there are now two QuickTimes. My guess is that if you use QTKit, you get QuickTime X, and otherwise you get QuickTime 7, but if that’s not how it is, I’m confused as to how you’d opt in. You don’t want your fan wound because you try to show efficiently encoded HD video on a weak machine and accidentally get QuickTime 7 instead of X, and if my hopes for a more efficient encoding process turn out to be correct, you definitely don’t want the wrong mode.

• I find myself wondering what this means for QuickTime for Windows. Many apps depend on it, but Apple’s not historically been in a hurry to upgrade the user-facing APIs to new, QTKit-level heights, or the technology foundation to corresponding, sometimes non-existant, breakthroughs on the Windows end. Apple maintains QuickTime for Windows because they must; pleasant, swift and native-looking are just a few words that are entirely inapplicable to QuickTime Player, and it sticks crap in your system tray. (Everyone does that, yes, but that’s not an excuse to fail, it’s a reason to succeed.)