Apple unlocks full-screen QuickTime playback, releases iTunes 7.3.1
QuickTime 7.2
The Cupertino-based company said QuickTime 7.2 includes a new version of QuickTime Player that unlocks support for viewing videos in full-screen — a feature which was previously available only through a $30 QuickTime Pro license.
QuickTime 7.2 also bundles "updates to the H.264 codec" and numerous bug fixes, Apple said. It's available as 51.4MB download for Mac users and a 19.3MB download for Windows users.
iTunes 7.3.1
Meanwhile, Apple also released iTunes 7.3.1, which "addresses a minor problem with iTunes 7.3 accessing the iTunes Library."
iTunes 7.3.1 is available as a 33.8MB download for Mac users and a 47.6MB download for Windows users.
59 Comments
Hopefully iTunes 7.3.1 will fix the 1 second pauses I've been experiencing on songs not played before in the beginning. Once they play that pause goes away.
It's about time they unlocked the full-screen. Every other movie player does it.
It's about time. It took way too long for Apple to realize that VLC can do everything QT Player can do (and more, like adjust audio sync), play fullscreen, play more media formats, and is completely free.
RIGHT ON!
It's about time. It took way too long for Apple to realize that VLC can do everything QT Player can do (and more, like adjust audio sync), play fullscreen, play more media formats, and is completely free.
Woo. QuickTime Pro makes sense again - the Pro licence lets you make files, the normal version gives you all of the playback features. Why did it take them so long to sort this back to the way it was before?!
Now the wait until all the Pro features just come free with Quicktime. You'd think that Apple would do these things so that it's more beneficial to be on the Mac side. Let Windows users pay for Quicktime Pro but give us Mac users it for nothing.
I wonder if the H264 update improves encoding performance. It is soooo slow.
There is also a couple of other issues. I find a lot of movies come out desaturated. Also if I use Quicktime's movie to mp4 with H264 instead of movie to quicktime with H264, the movie turns out worse (very blocky at points). Sometimes I actually encode to mpeg-1 instead and that's not right, I shouldn't have to resort to using an older codec to get rid of blockiness but I actually get better results.
It seems to me that it's because of the Quicktime with H264 slider, which looks like it does some sort of variable bitrate. The mp4 option doesn't have a slider. What I end up having to do is encode to Quicktime H264, then I open it again and export as MP4 but with a video passthrough - it's such a pain to do this on a lot of clips. I don't see why the MP4 option doesn't just have the same encoder options that the quicktime container uses.