QuickTime Player in Snow Leopard (10.6)

[Jeff Wexler]

The new version of QuickTime included with Snow Leopard (called QuickTime Player X) is almost a complete overhaul of the previous version, from the look and feel of the application windows right down to the preferences menu (or lack thereof). If you were looking to change some options but don't know where to start, this Preference Pane can help enable or disable many of QuickTime's features.

Megabyte Computing's QuickTime Player X Preference Pane 1.0 provides an interface to some QuickTime Player X preferences otherwise available only from the command line. It includes preferences for rounded corners, simultaneous recording, autoplay, display of closed captions and subtitles, exiting of fullscreen mode when switching applications, recent documents, and title bar and controller visibility. QuickTime Player X Prefernce Pane is available for Mac OS X 10.6.

http://megabytecomp.com/apps.aspx

[Q]

Just finished installing the new OS this morning.  I played around with Quicktime a little bit but haven't gotten through everything yet.

My only issue so far has been my Adobe InDesign has disappeared. 

[Jeff Wexler]

Adobe and Apple are only supporting the most current versions of Adobe products. You may also want to run Adobe update since the version of Flash that shipped with 10.6 is out of date.

I did read about Flash and 10.6 so I have downloaded the current Adobe Flash player to replace the older player installed by 10.6.

[studiomprd]

The last paragraph below is relevent to all early adopters:

" Rational Acoustics has completed initial testing of Smaart 6.1 with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and can confirm that there are problems with graphic performance and CPU consumption when running Smaart under the new OS as released. Specifically, Macintosh computers running OS X 10.6 now appear to be having problems drawing the portions of the Smaart program window that are rendered directly by the operating system's native 2-D painting methods. Additionally, Smaart seems to be using a large amount of CPU when running on Snow Leopard any time its main window is visible, even with all real-time operations suspended. On our test machine, Smaart 6.1 was observed to consume approximately 80 - 85% of available CPU when stopped and only 1-2% more than that when running full out.

As best we have been able to determine, Smaart's internal mathematical operations seem to be working normally in Snow Leopard and OpenGL performance seems largely unaffected. An exception is that when mouse cursor tracking functions force interaction between the real-time graphs (drawn by OpenGL) and on-screen controls that are rendered via the operating system's Carbon API, updates to real-time charts become intermittent. Usability of the program is severely impacted as a result of the latter issue, even though the accuracy of the data being produced apparently is not.

We have thus far been unable to determine whether these issues are due to a problem with Smaart itself or the operating system and we are therefore unable to estimate how long it may take to resolve them. We have had several reports of identical problems from early adopters in the field however and we are assuming this to be an endemic problem that is likely to affect any Smaart user migrating to Snow Leopard.

We therefore strongly recommend that Smaart users postpone migrating to Snow Leopard for the time being if possible. It may be noted that we would make the same recommendation if no problems had been discovered. In general we consider it a prudent precaution to wait a at least a few months before installing any major new OS release on any computer that is used professionally, and regard that as a standing recommendation to all users of any operating system we support. "

[Q]

Apple has rewritten several core processes in the new OS, so although visually many look the same, the code underneath is brand new.  Apple has been moving more and more graphics processing away from the CPU and made the switch to more robust graphics processors across the line in the last hardware updates.  There is a known issue with 10.6.0 and older applications that use OpenGL for rendering visuals.  With 10.6.0  Apple is moving to OpenCL for graphics processes.  Seems like that may be the issue with SMAART.  So, unless you have the latest machine with the most recent graphics processors, you may want to wait for 10.6.1.

I never install a new OS or software upgrade on a critical machine, and I always approach such an upgrade with the idea that I may have to spend significant time reverting to the previous versions.  I haven't lost anything critical, plus I have full backups and am prepared to use them.

[Marc Wielage]

Senator Michaels is right. My partner and I upgraded one of our computers to Snow Leopard, and immediately ran into a driver issue with eSATA drives and cards. Turns out the one company that makes all the eSATA drivers has not yet released a 10.6-compatible driver. Apparently this is a major issue, as shown in this thread. NOW they tell us...

I'm holding off doing any more upgrades until they resolve these issues.

--Marc W.