Snow Leopard’s QuickTime X with brand new features is an unobtrusive user interface and a top-to-bottom code overhaul designed to take advantage of Snow Leopard’s new technologies built for speed.
QuickTime X has been pitched as the next-generation media technology that powers the audio and video experience in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Leveraging Grand Central Dispatch and 64-bit computing, Snow Leopard’s two core technologies, QuickTime X delivers a notable speed increase in every aspect, from launching up to 2.4 times faster to a smooth, GPU-accelerated playback of HD videos.
In addition, QuickTime X takes advantage of OS X’s ColorSync technology to provide high-quality color reproduction during playback and when sharing media to your iPhone, iPod, or Apple TV. Also, Core Audio, Core Video and Core Animation all come into play to provide the highest possible video quality and eye-catching interface effects.
QuickTime X is similar to other key system apps and has been completely rewritten in Cocoa, Apple’s preferred Objective-C based application environment. This also means that QuickTime X shares no legacy code with the original QuickTime that had been unveiled 18 years ago, in 1991. Also, similar with Google’s Chrome, a fresh start has enabled Apple’s engineers to optimize QuickTime X for speed.
Of course, end-users don’t care much about what’s under the hood as all they want from a media player is stutter-free playback and a clean user interface, in addition to a range of file types and export options as QuickTime X delivers all of the above and in style, too.
A Clean UI
You’ll first notice a completely redesigned appearance that ditches the old brushed metal look in favor of the minimalistic interface with floating movie controls that fade in and out of the view, similar to the iTunes’ movie player. Even the window’s title bar fades out, leaving only the movie content itself floating on your desktop which is a core animation feat. Move the mouse and the window’s title bar and semi-translucent controls fade back into view.
In QuickTime X, both the panoramic and full screen movie playback are available, with no annoying Pro registration prompt in sight. Also, a new thumbnail strip makes navigating chaptered movies easier than before by automatically detecting scenes in a movie and creating chapter thumbnails, which is similar tolike in iMovie. The playback controls including, play or pause, forward, reverse, volume, scrubbing and volume are now lined up in a floating palette.
There are some users who may dislike the change as the semi-translucent palette obscures a portion of your video every time you move the mouse or hit a keyboard shortcut.
Hardware Accelerated with H.264 Playback
QuickTime X recognizes a greater number of audio and video formats by borrowing the technology found in the iPhone OS’s QuickTime subsystem. In addition, the player specifically supports GPU accelerated video decoding of H.264 files as other video formats are not hardware accelerated at this time.
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