QuickTime 4: New Features Added

May 8, 1999

Some new 'enhancements' have been added to Apple's QuickTime Streaming Channels page, as depicted in the animated image below:
 

Tabs now appear below each channel window to let you view the channel via QuickTime Player. More significantly, it now lets you conveniently add the streaming channel to your QuickTime Player favorites list. These tabs are actually tiny movie clips embedded into the page to enhance the user interface using mouseover effects.

But there're still some bugs to sort out. First of all, two QuickTime Player windows are launched, instead of just one. While the first window remains dormant, the second one proceeds to play the selected channel. But if QuickTime Player is already launched, only one window opens.

There is also a perceptible delay after clicking on the tabs before anything happens. The delay is made all the more apparent because there is no visual cue to tell you that negotiation and buffering is in progress, unlike in embedded streaming movie clips.

Apart from that, the mouseover effects still need work; as the pointer hovers over each tab, it's supposed to switch to a pointing hand but it doesn't. (Dig up and playback the movie clip from your cache folder and you'll see that it does.)

Moving on to QuickTime Player, adding a channel to your favorites list places a custom icon of the channel within the favorites drawer, like so:
 

Now, THAT I can appreciate. I can now access my favorite streaming channel directly off QuickTime Player, with its own unique icon to boot.

Creating Custom Movie Thumbnails
This tip appeared in an earlier article, but I thought to add it here:

• Scroll forward in any paused QuickTime movie until you come to a clearly identifiable frame.
• Click on the Movie menu, and select Set Poster Frame.
• Next, add your movie clip to the drawer by clicking the Favorites menu and selecting Add Favorite. Now you have the keyframe that you want as a thumbnail for your movie.

Look out for further enhancements to QuickTime 4 which will be highlighted in this page as and when they appear.

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