Posted by Jukka Aho on 09/22/06 21:11

Spex wrote:

>> The QT plugin, at least in Windows environment, doesn't seem to have
>> a full-screen mode, which is a big, big minus.

> You need QT Pro for that.

Well, that's just ridiculous. "Pro" version for basic functionality such
as full-screen playback? Apple should get their act together.

>> Also, in order to have the QT plugin installed on a Windows system,
>> you first need to install the QuickTime player, which is everything
>> but minimalistic in its cluttered rounded-edges weird-UI theming
>> craze.

> Real and MPC are aesthetic classics are they?

I have not touched the "real" Real Player in years, so I honestly don't
know how it looks today. But I'd rather not say what I thought about it
back when I was still forced to use it (that is, when "Real Alternative"
wasn't yet available) since this is, after all, a family newsgroup.

(OK, Real Player at least _used_ to be an ad-ridden, nasty and clumsy
piece of spyware that installed pesky auto-starting "services" totally
without the user's consent, required registration by e-mail address,
sent all kinds of information of playback preferences to The Man, and
generally tried to take over your machine. Perhaps they've sobered up
now and backpedalled these "Pinky and the Brain" style world domination
schemes of theirs a bit, but I'm not inclined to try their offerings
again if I can at all avoid them.)

As for Media Player Classic, it's just like a normal computer program
should be. Standard menus, standard user interface, light-weight,
functional; no "theming" or other useless gimmicks.

> Don't be a cheap skate just buy QT Pro and our experience will improve
> dramatically. QT Pro is well worth the peanuts it costs to upgrade.

If you want me to view videos on your website, you'll use a format that
doesn't drive me away or force me to buy additional software. (You're
free, of course, to make a licensing deal with Apple that allows you to
offer QT Pro as a free download for the users of your web site. That
would at least be a somewhat reasonable proposition. I'd probably still
not download it, though.)

> What is flattering is the steps M$ has gone to plagiarise the look of
> QT Player in Vista.

I don't like the current breed of MS media players any better than I
like QT, so I wholeheartedly agree with your observation. (Hence my
recommendation for Media Player Classic, instead of the MS media
player.)

>> Yet another great tool for overcoming the brainfarts of web designers
>> and media player developers alike is the MediaPlayerConnectivity
>> extension for Firefox [4], which allows playing back silly "embedded"
>> web video in regular, non-embedded players (yes, in full-screen mode,
>> too) and figuring out the actual URLs of the streams, which the web
>> "designers" so often try to hide in their convoluted-but-futile
>> JavaScript-based obfuscation attempts.

> Those web developers are clearly less brainfarted than those fools
> that want to watch full screen video that was originally encoded for
> a small embedded window. You must be a measurebator that likes to
> observe compression artifacts up close and personal.

Whether you like it or not, web pages (and, therefore, web video) is
viewed in multitude of environments and settings - not just on desktop
PCs, but also on portable devices, on "tv-out" based systems, etc.
Sometimes there's just a single person watching, sometimes a group of
people. Any single postage-stamp sized fixed solution that seems to work
for the web designer on his screen may not work at all for the users of
that website, so it's better to offer a choice than restrict and lock
down things. (Then there's the accessibility side of it. Webmasters that
deliberately try and make it _harder_ for the visually impaired and
hard-of-sight to experience the web are in dire need of some good
old-fashioned spanking and attitude adjustment.)

--
znark

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