Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

QuickTime Movies

A QuickTime movie is a digital movie—a file on your hard drive, a CD-ROM, or the Internet—that flashes many individual frames (photos) per second before your eyes, while also playing a synchronized soundtrack.

Movies on the Desktop

As noted in Section 1.6, you don’t need any special software to play QuickTime movies. Just view their windows in column view, and then proceed as shown in Figure 14-4.

QuickTime Player

Dozens of Mac OS X programs can open QuickTime movies, play them back, and sometimes even incorporate them into documents: Word, FileMaker, AppleWorks, PowerPoint, Internet Explorer, America Online, and so on.

But the cornerstone of Mac OS X’s movie-playback software is QuickTime Player, which sits in your Applications→QuickTime folder (and even comes factory-installed on the Dock). It does exactly what it’s designed to do: show pictures, play movies, and play sounds.

Note

Like Preview, another basic Mac OS X utility program, QuickTime Player can also open many graphics files—such as JPEG, GIF, TIFF, PICT, and even native Photoshop documents. You can either drag these graphics files onto the QuickTime Player icon, or—from within QuickTime Player—choose File→Open Movie in New Player.

Figure 14-4. You can preview a selected QuickTime movie, in miniature, right in column view. Click the Play triangle to play; click it again to stop. The two buttons on the right end ...