Not at all what I expected.

Fred: With QuickTime you need what are called component plugins to make QuickTime to see/play files. The files usually go into the file folder /Library/QuickTime/.

1. For MPEG playback use Apple's MPEG-2 component.

2. For other various formats use the free Perian

3. To play Windows Media 9 or below (Windows Media 10 has not been yet available for Mac - blame Microsoft) use Flip4Mac


These three QuickTime components will make your web video experience more enjoyable on a Mac.

Also if you want to hack a Mac to make it bend to your tastes search the web sites MacOSXHints and Accelerate Your Macintosh (with thier excellent drive upgrade lasso). Search these sites and you will find numerous ways to tweak your Mac to your tastes.
 
Satcomer - Thanks (for the hack tips too! I trawled this a few days after buying the machie and found some french site with a drive flash hack but alas that is sadly only good for non-intel variants)! This would seem to be the case. I mentioned maybe on another thread I have perian, Flip for Mac, DivX, MPlayer and VLC but just checking my installed codecs it would appear you are right there - no sign of MPEG-2.

Oddly as I mentioned I can open MPEG-2's every time with VLC and then they will play back in quicktime with sound. If I don't follow this routine I generally get picture only and no sound. I guess for now it's a toss-up on whether I want to splash out another $20.00 to view my tutorials. It seems this whole codec racket is just as scandalous on MAC as it was on windows. That was one of the prime reasons for my decision to switch incidentally. I'm sick of all this racketeering in the media market. I am starting to understand fully now why piracy exists and have to admit I'm getting very very tempted by uncle Darth and the Darkside!

Seems that we are all lambs to the slaughter these days - and I for one hope that the music industry continues to struggle - it's therecord companies that have been stealing from the artists and not the cusomers. The problem being that nowadays the nmoguls no longer have enough extortion money to continue to support their coke-fuelled lifestyles, 10 mistresses and houses in all the major tax havens of the world. This war they're waging 'on behalf' of artists' intellectual rights is a plane smokescreen. Doesn't take a genius to figure that artists are now independently producing their own material and not only making it available in mp3 format but also via all the major Peer to Peer Networking tools. Why? because they we're getting less and less of the take while the record producers got richer and richer. And the Movie Industry is perhaps the biggest joke of all where does any human being justify $7 for a couple of months work atmost? That's absolute insanity and I wouldn't mind but thelikes of Tom Cruise cannot act to save his life- let alone the life of a kitten! Perhaps a very healthy dose of piracy might see the likes of him getting a realistic paycheck for once in his life and bring the movie Industry bosses down a few pegs at the same time!

Okay I've wandered slightly off the path here but I'm right at the point of saying stuff them too! I've had enough of this racketeering across the board and lack of ethics by companies trying to gain the extra buck by flooding the market with 'yet another' codec or media player.

I'm all for supporting small companies trying to make an honest buck out of a new or innovative product but taking what is basically the same product and encoding it every six ways from friday and then charging people for the decoder is downright underhanded and malicios and companies of whatever size deserve to get hit with everything the pirates have to throw at them - and then some. Whether or not you agree with me is fine. Thats everybody's choice. For now I think I can and will have to live with this inconvenience and others such as not being able to make my DVD player multi- region.

I am among many many people who live between different continents and have DVDs encoded for regions 1,2 and 4. This 5 lives thing is a joke and way out of date and wish someone could do something similar to what fengtao did with DVD Region Free on windows and allow you unlimited lives without having to flash the drive or anything quite so drastic. Yes VLC is a temporary but not all that realistic solution for now. I cannot blame Steve Jobs for doing things by the book but wish he could pressure the standards people or the like oin the same way he has pitched mp3 at the music industry. At least he tries to stick with the 'public gets what the public wants' principle and is in touch with his market which is way more than you can say for the fat-cat coke moguls in downtown record companies that are so stoned they have no clue anymore!

Happy New Year! ;)
 
Fred Flinstone said:
Similarly with iTunes it annoys me that every time I insert a music CD I get prompted by default on whether or not to copy to the library. Why would I want this to happen by default when I already have it on CD?
Click to expand...

iTunes is an mp3 player, so logically if you insert a CD it will offer you the option to convert the CD to mp3 so that you can have it on your library and then copy it to your iPod (for example). You can change what iTunes does when a CD is inserted in it's preferences.

As an afterthought I might want to create a compilation maybe in mp3. But only then will I need to tell itunes to import the music. Converting to MP3 is another story - and over complicated in iTunes. Once again maybe I need to investigate iTunes a bit further to change it's default behaviour but it's this very kind of thing that has always turned me off this Media Player in Particular, as well as sudden unexplained blips during playback.
Click to expand...

Hmm, I fail to see what is so complicated about converting to MP3 in iTunes. The default audio format to which iTunes is set to convert is ACC, you can change it to mp3 and adjust the quality in the preferences window. After that it is only a matter of inserting the CD and clicking import. iTunes will look for the CD information and change the song titles. It can be even easier, just set iTunes to import the CD automatically, it will not prompt you and you won't need to click import.
 
well I was faced with this a few days ago - and once again I bring up the 'clutter' factor. It seems to me the only way to do this is to import wav files or whatever into the Library then cmd clicking to convert the tracks to mp3 so having again 2 or 3 versions depending of the same track in different formats. To me that is pointless and also confusing for the purpose of trying to identigy a track you are tying to play in a particular format. Not having an interest in iPod I cannot comment there but I followed this conversionn method having googled it on the web. Took me a while to identify the copied wav files to delete them as they were unwanted space-wasters... I then had to rename all the tunes and the artist etc as wehat I have are some Argentinian tango tunes that are obviously not in gracenote's database so they don''t autmatically get dumbed into the generic waste folder - or the common untiltled folder as it is. Why not at the very least create a new untitled folder when importing uniquely new tunes from a unique and different disc I ask?

It would seem to me to be a much better idea that you were given the option when you insert a disc into the super drive to rip tunes directly to iTunes Library or a designated folder on the HD in the format of choice without all this need for duplication and reduplication. I'm quite sure there are most likely alternative Media Players for mac to iTunes and similarly rippers that will let you carry out the task in a more simplified and less cluttersome way that what I had to do.

I see your comment but I was given no such option on inserting the CD - maybe I will try it with a different cd. Howevere I turned of that niggly message that asks me what to do whenever I insert a disc into the machine so that's probably why. I either want to watch a movie, listen to a cd or transfer files and don't like to be pestered time and again with screens like that. So what I then did is when the disc opens with iTunes I looked for some kind of ripping tool to prevent me having to first transfer the tunes in in wav and then convert them - but could not find such a thing


Update: Aha - I have just discovered how - Say no to import tunes into the library. Then select all and go to the advanced tab and select convert all to mp3 (Much Better!) I await to see what happens to them now and where the'll be put!!!! Thanks again for the feedback!

- alas as I feared, straight into the one folder for the unidentified masse..... guess I will have to rename - resort relabel onnce again!!!! One battle won, at least for now. So thanks again!
 
CD/DVD prefences in Sys Prefs can change the default for what you want to do when faced with optical media. the defaults work well for the masses.

and yes, MPEG-2 specifically has always has a royalty attached to it. MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 are basically 'free'
 
I _really_ don't understand your problem of having to go through WAV for importing CDs. iTunes has *always* directly converted from CD to MP3 if you had the preferences set to do so. Simply turn *automatic* importing off, so you can label the CD and tracknames etc. before importing (for the cases where gracenote doesn't find the CD), select the tracks you want imported and hit "import" - done. If you want to find the folder the imported tracks are located in, you select the track in iTunes (the one in the Library, not the one on the CD, of course) and hit Cmd-R ("reveal in Finder").
 
Guys thanks - Like I mentioned in my last reply to Salival's post (at the very end) i finally discovered a quick way to do this without having to go through wave. But if the disc contents are not stored on the gracenote database everything gets lumped into a unique untitled folder as Track 1 Track 2 etc.... Imageine 10 discs like this all in the one folder 10 x Traxck 1, 10 x Track 2 etc. I want to see if somehow iTunes can reconize each disc as being uniqe and create folders thus. It might then be easier to organoze the library.

As I mentioned I need to examine iTunes a bit more closely vis a vis it's layout and customization options.

It looks a lot more promising than before though. As for the MPeg -2 question I am not sure that downloading the APple decoder will improve things much. The problem is that I can see the video perfectly in QT, VLC, MPLayer etc. The only player that will not play sound properly is QT. Once I have opened the file or files with VLC or MPlayer beforehand will QT playbact perfectly with Sound and Vision. This suggests that somewhere I have an MPeg-2 Codec that's doing the job perfectly but for some reason QT has a problem with sound unless it is 'tricked' first!

Hey - Last night I discovered the podcast via the iTunes Library and am wowed by it - fast and in many cases Hi-D quality. When QT is good it's very very good but when it is bad......

Maybe it's my bias but all Media Players and Codecs right now are runners up to DivX. I have encoded many huge Videos I made on my travels in The Amazon,Peru and Venezuela to DivX from file sizez of 4Gb and more at times and get great quality Hi-D at small sizes and no playback problems when changed to avi on any platform with the divX codec installed.

Even QT with sorensen squeeze applied still doesn't quite match it for small files and great quality output.

Additionally I have had problems too with movies I have converted to .mov on the mac and transferred them to windows. I had to download the 3ivx codec to render them succesfully

Still comes back to the 'why so many codecs?' question all the time. No more than licenced extorsion is my view and that ain't about to change in a hurry!
 
Fred Flinstone said:
Still comes back to the 'why so many codecs?' question all the time. No more than licenced extorsion is my view and that ain't about to change in a hurry!
Click to expand...

Well first you have to blame Microsoft trying to make their own "standard". You have to blame people all around the world wanting to use royalty free codecs. Also you have to blame the ever changing video files throughout computer history. So yell at all those developers.:rolleyes:
 
Fred Flinstone said:
But if the disc contents are not stored on the gracenote database everything gets lumped into a unique untitled folder as Track 1 Track 2 etc.... Imageine 10 discs like this all in the one folder 10 x Traxck 1, 10 x Track 2 etc. I want to see if somehow iTunes can reconize each disc as being uniqe and create folders thus. It might then be easier to organoze the library.
Click to expand...

Like I just explained: Give the CD, artists and tracks names _before_ importing, then they're automatically filed into their own folders. You'll want to do that eventually, anyway, but if you do it before importing, everything gets easier.
 
and it's very rare now that Gracenote doesn't have the album you want. i'm into a lot of very obscure stuff (netlabels and rarities etc) and i've not had a problem in years.
 
Satcomer - I guess I can add that once upon a time there was film. I've been arounf long enough to remember it too, Film was film and came in 8mm or 16mm varieties. you bought a roll or a few rolls of film and made your movie, or bought a movie put in in your machine and it delivered end result as desired. No royalties none of this B.S. Lah-di-dah that's flying around to day. I do blame Microsoft/ developers etc. Certain formats like realtime rm for example are a complete waste of space/ That and wmv have to be the two biggest rip-offs of all.

Suddenly the world lost it's magic and this corrupt greedy b******s decided to get in 'on the action here and extort whatever they could from people.

First there was Betamax v VHS. Once again Same film or tape but packaged differently - so why 2 distinctly different systems. How is it like in the Mac vs VHS scenario did vhs command the lions share of the Market when Betamax was always way superior for quality (Looks I guess). Thank god that along came DVD and now both are obsolete but DVD was what truly started of this 'standards' joke. I for one think it's way past time they address this and have a united standard that is freely available without all the regional coding restriction b******t. That my friend is the precedent for all the extorsion currently been experienced in the movie market. Already HD has been polluted with this same filth before it has really gotten off the ground.

I blame all of those you mention but above all the consumer. If the consumer was to say no often enough then sooner or later some of these chancers would be exactly where they deserve - on the dole or better still in prison for extorsion! It's no secret that I feel very stongly on this subject. It was the consumer after all that killed a superior product like betamax. Thankfully nowadays Mac is starting to become a whole lot more popular. Certainly it is way sexier than ever and powerful and obviously in some respects a bit different. As a standalone product I will bet it's very survival too has been in question over the years as more and more people got sucked into the Microsoft 'family'. Apple were guilty from the very beginning of high prices and bad marketing. I never even saw a Mac of any kind before maybe 1996 other than the original tape driven ones....

Anyway once again I wander - I think I have made my point and better explained what it is I was trying to say - codecs and Medial players are a rip off with very few exceptions. How many do we really need?

Again in my case I think my problem seems to be some kind of conflict between quicktime and MPlayer so I guess I will need to wipe all the players and codecs and reinstall them from scratch - maybe leaving out MPlayer to see if it will fix the problem.
 
Don't delete Quicktime and its players. You'll only run into problems. But the iTunes stuff is solved now, right?
 
Hi Fryke

I haven't deleted QT as yet but I did so previously having saved the codecs folder elsewhere first. I have taken MPLayer off though and will maybe restart the machine tomorrow sometime and see if the condition had impoved.The conflict is that bad that even playing Myst I couldn't hear sound without going through the whole routine I need to play Mpegs in QT.

If I have my QT install Package and backup my codecs - and delete the com.apple.quicktime preference how will I run into problems? Just a question but surely the installer will reset these prefs etc for me....

I'll take heed of your warning but would appreciate further feedback to this end.

Thanks again
 
I'm not sure whether the QT installer works without any form of QT being present. I thought _all_ QT packages for Mac OS X from apple.com are only updater-packages, i.e. they expect QT to be present in the first place. (I might be wrong and this only applies for other parts of the system like Safari, which can be a real drag if deleted...)
 
Fred Flinstone said:
Again in my case I think my problem seems to be some kind of conflict between quicktime and MPlayer so I guess I will need to wipe all the players and codecs and reinstall them from scratch - maybe leaving out MPlayer to see if it will fix the problem.
Click to expand...

If MPlayer is giving you problems uninstall it and try VLC Media Player, it will play virtually any file you put into it.

If I have my QT install Package and backup my codecs - and delete the com.apple.quicktime preference how will I run into problems? Just a question but surely the installer will reset these prefs etc for me....
Click to expand...

QuickTime is an essential component of the OS, so deleting it is NOT a good idea. Try updating it to it's latest version or check the Apple Support forums for Quicktime to see if someone else had the same problem as you did.

Also run Disk Utility to repair permissions every once in a while.


sal
 
Hi Saival I run the reset permissions routine once a week already. I had MPLayer, VLA and Mplayer all installed and it is my guess that MPlayer and QT were having conflicts.

At present since removing MPlayer last night Quick Time is playing the mpegs with sound and vision (fingers crossed). Before this as I mentioned many times I had to open an mpeg with MPlayer to get sound, then open it in Quicktime so I could view the same movie with sound and vision.I had to open an Mpeg with MPlayer likewise before playing the game Myst IV or V,

I hope that removing MPlayer has now finally fixed the problem. VLC is still firmlt there though
 
Preview is absolutely awful for managing and viewing graphic files! Possibly the worst app I've ever used on any platform for this purpose. An a Graphics designer I've used quite a few, so that's really saying something!

Again and again I try to get something useful or even logical out of preview vis a vis viewing images 'on the fly'

In finder: Take any folder with images numbered say 1 to 15 (001 to 015) , Highlight them all and double click one to open them with preview. They are never in sequence, why??? No matter what I try you get something like 001, 002,006,007,008 then numbers 003 to 005 are lumped in somewhere down the end of the list.

Sorry to burst anyones bubble here - and I'm not throwing Windows at anyone either. Just simple Logic once again. Seems that preview is totally illiterate and innumeric when iot comes to counting and ordering.

Am fast reaching the opinion that preview can never be relied on for anything more than one image at a time...... awful and a waste of space!
 
Just right click on an empty space of the drawer, it gives you the option to sort the images by name, date, type, etc.


sal
 
salival said:
Just right click on an empty space of the drawer, it gives you the option to sort the images by name, date, type, etc.


sal
Click to expand...

Salival - you're magic. You're absolutely right. It's still dreadful on the Part of apple for not having this better illustrated or indeed having any rerference in either the view, preference or help files.

Quite clearly this is something that only the seasoned and experienced Mac user woul know about - or the psychic.

Actually I discovered an option in preferences to view all files in 1 window. Now that coupled with this newfound knowledge puts prieview in a whole noew light altogether. Plus the ability to resize the thiumbs....

This kind of stuff should absolutely be printed in the owners handbook!!!

Thanks again!!!!
 
Fred Flinstone said:
It's still dreadful on the Part of apple for not having this better illustrated or indeed having any rerference in either the view, preference or help files.

Quite clearly this is something that only the seasoned and experienced Mac user woul know about - or the psychic.
Click to expand...

Go to your local bookstore and buy either Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual or Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual [ILLUSTRATED]. Both of these are easy reading and very informative. You can find either of them in box retail book stores.
 
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