Hacker News Reader

Comment by kw_ | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is because Perian has eliminated much of the need for VLC.

Quicktime can't crank the volume up like VLC does. It sounds like a small thing, but when you're on a laptop with little speakers it makes a big difference.

Yeah it can. There are two ways, in the sound section of the video properties ("boost") or by holding shift and pressing the up-arrow key. Normally the QuickTime volume control widget stops you at 0db (any more than that and you would be clipping the signal) but if you hold shift and keep pressing up (up and down control the volume widget) it will go beyond 0db, even though it doesn't visually indicate it.

Sadly, they disabled this in QuickTime X. Some of my friends use older versions of QuickTime to get around this problem.

Geez, os x is completely riddled with tricks you 'have to know', usually achieved by some obscure key combination. Which UI book did they get this out of ? ...

The don't-clutter-my-screen-with-nine-hundred-thousand-buttons-and-menus book?

Joking aside, most OS X keyboard shortcuts actually follow a very rational scheme (which is mentioned in the Apple HIG, IIRC). If Cmd+X performs an action X, both Cmd+Shift+X and Cmd+Opt+X will perform similar versions of X, so you don't have trouble remembering "special" shortcuts.

Example: Cmd+Q quits an application, Cmd+Shift+Q logs you out and Cmd+Opt+Shift+Q logs you out without confirmation.

Another example: Cmd+Opt+Esc brings up the Force Quit dialog. Cmd+Shift+Opt+Esc force quits the current application without confirmation.

I don't think this is an OS X specific thing. I suspect Windows, KDE and GNOME all follow a similar HIG.

(No, none of those shortcuts are good for your RSI.)

Ah lame, I haven't updated to Snow Leopard yet so I didn't know.

Perian is nice, but VLC is great to have as a fallback: it works on everything up to and including scratched DVD's, and it's easy enough to use being a standalone app.

Yes, VLC's reading of DVDs is much more permissive. I've never figured out what the deal is with Apple's DVD reading software.

Perian is hampered in many places by the limitations of QuickTime itself. Apple hasn't yet provided any API for QTX, but they've promised us that it fixes many of our problems. We've communicated with the QuickTime team, and they're aware of our frustrations and seem at least somewhat inclined to work with us once QTX has a reasonable API.

I'd say it has some to do with that but also players like MPlayer which are provide much greater playback performance for the most part.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com