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![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/37047747/602257) | From: ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) cliph
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 2:19 AM (UTC)
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For playing those videos you're having some difficulty with give VLC a go. It'll work, almost certainly.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/996772/447266) | From: ydna
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 2:20 AM (UTC)
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Seconded. mplayer sucks on a mac - it actually breaks my video output when it goes into full-screen mode. (which it does by default). VLC, however, plays anything and just works.
| From: ydna
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 2:26 AM (UTC)
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Just hide the fucking Dock. It's useless. Get Quicksilver
From: vajrabelle
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 7:24 AM (UTC)
quicksilver tutorial | (Link)
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VLC will play most video, there's also a WMP9 from Microsoft if you have to go that way.
Check the resolution you're driving your monitor at, you might need to tweak the refresh and crank the font smoothing down a bit lower.
If you make your dock icons really huge, or put enough stuff in your doc, the trashcan stays in the same place. There are also a lot of keyboard shortcuts in OS X that didn't exist in classic, so you can trash documents with key commands now.
Oh, and Tiger? Big waste of time from what I can tell so far. I don't get Dashboard at all, just something else to get in my way while I'm trying to work.
I switch between fvwm2 (SHUT UP!) and OS X throughout the day, the only thing that I'm really disliking is going between Expose' and virtual panning of a huge desktop.
If you need VNC, ChickenOfTheVNC is the least-sucky I've found.
As far as the Dock goes, you can also pin it to one end:
sh % defaults write com.apple.dock pinning end
VLC is indeed your multi‐platform friend.
I’ve been trying to use Dock‐like applications on Windows, and never liked it enough (though they mimicked the basic functionality pretty well (as I could see it later in PearPC)) to keep them.
I wonder if WMP for the Mac is anywhere as terrible as QuickTime for Win32 is. Because if anything, the pre‐7.0 WMP is a decent little thing (and for an open‐source approximation, Media Player Classic).
Or, from a shell you can issue "defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES".
XEmacs: The Carbonated XEmacs was easy to build and install, but it's crash-happy. With my .emacs file loaded, it crashes as soon as I visit the first file. And I am sad. Try removing your default-mode-line-format.
To get the dock to stick to a corner rather than centering, you could try TinkerTool - I haven't used it much, but it seems to work.
Or just edit ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist to add a 'pinning' key with a string value of 'end'.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/14734273/1636120) | From: jonxp
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 3:03 AM (UTC)
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Well, even though you've been told twelve times now, I figured I'd beat the horse too. VLC will work for your media needs. It's not the most stable ( I don't mean it crashes constantly, but while playing through my library of all of the Simpsons, it crashes after about 48 hours) but it plays just about anything.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/68505097/18600) | From: vxo
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 3:08 AM (UTC)
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The color differences could be due to OSX's builtin color correction. Under System Preferences / Displays / Color, there's a calibration tool you can use to adjust the gamma and color balance for your monitors. (And I waited how long for a usable tool to do that on Linux?!) By the way, the Mplayer OS X project has removed every smegging bit of GUI stupidity from mplayer. It has a very simple file select/playlist box, and that's it. It's worth checking out. As far as I know, WMP is the only thing that'll play WMV3 video on a Mac. The older codec will run in mplayer, but they don't seem to have a way of decoding the new one yet.
There's a quicktime component for WMV (including WMV3/Media Player 9). Costs ten bucks for player only version, $50 for a version that also allows importing into quicktime hosts. And IMO, the most sensible video player on Mac OS X is probably XinePlayer, as it is the only one (sans quicktime player), that has the controls in the same window as the video.
Media playback: Real Player on OS X fails to suck anywhere near as much as it does on Windows. It's quite usable and will play its own stuff as well as anything QuickTime can. VLC is... Well, people keep advocating it, and I bought into that for a while, but I found that the sound kept changing pitch on me. Very bloody annoying if you're watching a movie. Presumably that doesn't happen to everyone, but I'd keep an ear out for it. I'd thought it was dodgy source material for quite a while until testing with other players showed it was VLC doing it.
Dock: I've been using a thing called "DockMover" for years. You run it once, the dock is pinned to a screen edge (I have it on the left side of the screen pinned to the bottom, the trash is thus always bottom-left). It stays that way unless you trash your dock prefs.
VLC is indeed a good way to play those files QT refuses to handle. AFAIK, VLC and mplayer both use the ffmpeg library to play files, so the same files should be compatible with both. I think that VLC has a slight edge so far as UI goes — they've really got the whole metal-controller thing down pat — but mplayer's de-blocking algorithm is slightly better. WMP is horrid, but sometimes a necessary evil. It doesn't play content encoded by WMP10, though. The dock is a product demo gone wrong. Even the NEXTStep 'dock' was better than OS X's (although docklings died a mercifully swift death). There are two options: you can use a tool like OnyX to pin the dock to one side of the screen, ensuring the trash is always in the same place. Alternatively, you can buy DragThing, which gives you a dock which works, a trash on the desktop, and other things.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/5887295/515656) | From: jwz
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 3:50 AM (UTC)
Re: Dock, et al | (Link)
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Well, since I have a right mouse button, I always just use Move To Trash on the context menu; that's way faster than dragging.
I still find the dock hard to use for its other three purposes, though (listing favorite apps, listing running apps, listing open windows).
Some of the kids in the office have it set up so the dock is small and doesn't change size. never paid enough attention to know what they did, but B or DK probably know. I don't think that will solve the problem of the trashcan moving when more or fewer apps are running.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/46263782/1284091) | From: cyflea
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 4:03 AM (UTC)
meta key | (Link)
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Terminal, Window Settings, Keyboard. - "use option as meta key".
careful - don't hit command-w if you mean option-w...
"10.4 is the bug-fix release of 10.3"
Some bugfix. It has way more bugs than 10.3 did. I'm pretty disappointed.
"I haven't had any luck installing Perl libraries with CPAN. E.g., "cpan install Image::Magick" has compilation errors even after I've Finked as many relevant libraries as I can. What's the trick here?"
... Not to use fink. Or rather, to use fink for Image Magick itself (including the developer libraries and, oh, preferably to build them from sources rather than just grabbing the set of random stuff that some fink packager thought everyone could get by with), but to avoid fink like the plague when it comes to Perl and everything perl-related.
It took me quite a long time to figure out that Apple in their infinite wisdom strong-armed Perl into installing all its libraries and modules in non-standard places, that there are two copies of Perl on the system (as far as I can tell the one in /Private/Library is used by OS/X for system maintenance tasks and the one that stashes everything under /Library is for the users to mess with), and that fink randomly removes (as well as installs) modules the random-fink-packager-dudes figure you need. fink doesn't really map well onto the CPAN module inheritance tree.
I'd suggest going to your linux box, using perl -MCPAN -e autobundle to generate a bundle file listing your current module set, edit it by hand to remove linux-specific stuff, then feeding it to cpan (while logged in as root) to sort everything out.
Ahem: s/\/Private\/Library/\/System\/Library/g
(It's too early in the morning for my brain to work.)
Oh, and try not to rebuild the Perl binaries if you can avoid it. They might have fixed it in 5.8.1 so that it doesn't barf everything up in the wrong place, but I'm not risking it again (at least, not without asking a real Perl-OS/X guru.)
You mightn't have come across it yet, but Mac OS X has a nasty habit of shitting .DS_Store files all over network shares. This little Finder hack will stop it doing that. At last. Look out for the dashboard Weather Widget, it leaks (ugh). Quicksilver is indeed a sexy launcher and file utility. Most of its cleverness is hidden away, but the documentation shows you how you can work on groups of files, do web-related actions (like imdb searches), and quick command-line stuff, etc. VLC is a bit buggy for me on Tiger (it'll crash occasionally when coming out of full-screen on my TV), but it's handled every mpeg I've thrown at it, plus DivX and xvid, OGMs, and older WMVs (albeit badly). I don't know if you do IM, but Proteus and Adium are all the rage in multiprotocol land, they both use libgaim, with all the powers of said beast. Panic do a saucy FTP client (Transmit) and newsreader (Unison) if you want good GUIs. Speaking of which, the "Window settings" option in the Terminal menu has a tickybox in the Keyboard section that turns the alt/option key into a meta key, which is nice for emacs (unless, gasp, you were using the alt key for something else). I also recommend turning on the option that asks for confirmation when closing a window, because I sure as hell know I do Command-W instead of Meta-W often enough. Apple are slowly getting the hang of Fitt's law - Tiger's better than Panther for that. Throw the mouse into a screen corner like the Apple menu, the spotlight icon, the Dashboard (+) thing, or a screen edge like the dock and it'll do the right thing when you click, rather than nothing: the icons don't appear to touch the edges or corners, but their clickable areas do. You can also assign some actions to the screen corners, like start/disable screensaver, show all windows, etc. And the keyboard preference pane lets you disable or reassign Caps Lock to some other action, which makes me happy. No Fittslawian trashcan yet though, sorry. Konfabulator comes with a trashcan widget you can stick anywhere on the screen - that'll do the job, if you don't mind paying $20 for .. well, basically Dashboard Pro :) SubEthaEdit is a nice simple text editor if you want to try something more Maccy than Emacs. On the subject of Perl-hacking, I've found that some things are installed in folders that Apple have decided are sacred, so you need to sudo things like PHP's PEAR package installer, and maybe CPAN too. Your default user account is an Administrator, but it's not root by a long shot. Good luck!
I can also vouch for Panic's Transmit. SubEthaEdit is a good start, though I found the syntax highlighting to be sub-par... not compared to emacs though :) Compared to BBEdit, which is my coding tool of choice.
I think I gave up on computer science when I learned about Fitt's law. Don't need a weatherman to know that it's easier to click on a bigger icon. Yeah, and I know it's more than that, but does it really matter?
Problem is we need GUI design classes for the techno-geeks, and maybe the only thing engineers can understand is a formula (even if it does include "blog"). But then we have interfaces designed for approximations of human behavior not humans. Just like modern medicine.
And to think I created a LJ (an LJ?) account to post this.
wow, I’m going to have to look into the VLC player...seems very popular.
I also cant help but wonder why you haven’t got a KVM yet? although it does sound like you have some rather complicated connection issues with your keyboard. I’m sure you could find something to get rid of a few of them tho.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/39569451/6304551) | From: packetslave
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 6:20 AM (UTC)
QuickTime and MPEG playback | (Link)
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I echo the recommendation to use VLC, but for playing MPEG2 in QuickTime there's actually a separate component you need to buy from Apple (note that this was true under QT6, not 100% if it's true under 7/Tiger). There was some kind of deal with licensing rights or something where Apple couldn't include the MPEG codec for free. http://www.apple.com/quicktime/mpeg2/Annoying, but there you go.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/348023/248731) | From: nester
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 10:08 AM (UTC)
Re: QuickTime and MPEG playback | (Link)
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That was my assumption.. MPEG2 codec.. might try to play those MPEG files in a DVD player.
Under windows, if you have a DVD decoder installed, you can open MPEG2 in any video app, but not sure how mac handles that..
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/1471429/525123) | From: psr
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 6:21 AM (UTC)
Sounds like paradise | (Link)
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No really. I don't know what you mean when you say that Darwin Ports and Fink represent much of what I was trying to escape in the first place. Surely proper package management systems are just about the best thing about Linux? They mean that you get bug fixes to the software you install as they come out, without having to subscribe to a thousand different mailing lists and you don't have to worry about compatibility problems. Downloading and installing individual packages one at a time sounds much too much like hard work, with much too little reward, even if you don't have to build them from source! I can see why a ports system would sound like a bad idea (I have friends who use Gentoo. Every time a new point release of OpenOffice comes out, emerge spends the best part of a day building it on each of their machines. They say it's great, I don't quite see the attraction myself), but as far as I can see the problem with Fink isn't apt, it's the quality of their repositories, and the lack of a decent GUI for apt under OSX. So now you have different video players with different GUIs for different file formats, and I bet they don't use standard widgets. So much for unity of interface. I bet you can't skip the interminable introductions on DVDs either. The reaction from the Mac OS peanut gallery? You didn't try vlc! . This when other video players under Linux are actually starting to become pretty useful! Oh, and your mouse driver is nagware. Your mouse driver. Maybe you're right that Mac OS X is better than any of the Linux distributions available at the moment - you certainly don't have to use any of them for very long to realise that things aren't all sweetness and light - but it doesn't sound like there's very much in it, and it looks like the best of the Linux distributions aspire to be something very much better. I don't think I'll be switching any time soon.
| From: psr
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 8:14 AM (UTC)
Re: Sounds like paradise | (Link)
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I think I should temper that last post a bit.
It wasn't trying to say that you never should have switched, or that Mac OS is rubbish, or that you're a traitorous wretch. If you're more comfortable in Mac OS, then so be it.
I also wasn't trying to say that you should have tried switching distributions before switching to another platform. You'd still have been left with Linux, and lets face it, it isn't easy to live with if you ever want to do something that you don't already know how to do.
That said, switching distributions would have fixed some of your specific problems (I know you hate people saying that, and I wouldn't if it weren't so very obvious that whatever you were using before was a piece of shit) e.g. with your soundcard. I have an SB Live, and it works fine (I'm not using digital out though). The reason I didn't post a reply when you were asking about it is that I don't know why it works. It just does, like it should.
My question was simply meant to be:
Doesn't not having a decent version of apt or something like it, having to have more than one video player, and having a shareware mouse driver annoy you? It sounds pretty annoying to me.
![[User Picture]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/9624370/1571) | From: evan
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 7:55 AM (UTC)
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This pretty much was my experience as well: don't expect / try to make it work like what you're used to and you'll get along pretty well. I know you've had problems with mplayer in the past, but there's a .pkg-clicky-clicky-installable version that I had success with in the past.
Fonts: I recall reading some discussion about the way to properly antialias dark/light is different from light/dark, which is why antialiased light/dark looks bad on Linux. (The guy who did the antialiasing work is aware of the problem, but for some reason hasn't fixed it yet; I don't really know what it is.) I vaguely believe it has something to do with gamma correction.
Dock: just resize it to tiny and don't use it. Definitely try QuickSilver, and make the Expose window-switching into a hot corner on your desktop. (Again, this is an example of biting the bullet and learning the Way They Do It. I wouldn't say it's worse or better, just mostly different.) This is the way most mac-heads I know use their computer.
If you really really miss alt-drag to move windows (that was my biggest hurdle), try looking at "GeekBind": it's sorta janky but it almost works.
In addition to the dozen replies suggesting VLC as your video player, I'd also point your attention to "Mplayer OS X". I know, you said you're sick of mplayer - but this is a non-headache-inducing, slickly-bundled OS X equivalent of the same. I use VLC as my main video player, but there are a small percentage of videos (less than 1%) which it chokes on that Mplayer will play.
Yeah, I know it's been said, but mplayer for OSX is just nice. Simple, clean, works. And it has the best performance of any player I've tried, so my old 867Mhz G4 powerbook plays everything smoothly. That's just not true for the Quicktime plug-ins I've found.
Making "play" be:
#!/bin/sh
/Library/Application\ Support/ffmpegX/mplayer -fs -cache 500 -framedrop "$1"
...means that "play " ...just works. Every time. I did not have to fuck with drivers, config files, weird install practices. Install, try, oh look MST3K is on my monitor! Cooooooooool.
The best part was that I actually already had it installed because I had previously installed a video file format converter that used it. Heh.
From: sfritz
Mon, 13-Jun-2005 8:15 AM (UTC)
On movies | (Link)
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Go ahead and install vlc, it's clean and doesn't feel crappy like mplayer. It plays about everything out of the bo.x
Second Screen: You might also enjoy Desktop Manager to get virtual desktop functionality back. This is something I wish OS X shipped with. Also! Before you trash your DiamondPro, which would be an absolute travesty, please consider opening it up and messing with the adjusters inside. My bf had the same problem (major fuzziness) with a ViewSonic that he thought was toast... turned out it probably just got jiggled too much from moving apartment to apartment. There are usually adjustment screws inside the monitor case for fine-tuning the shadow mask etc... just avoid any capacitors :) Dock: Might I suggest DragThing? Yeah, it's shareware, but it's won a ton of awards and praise and I'm not sure what I'd do without it. I have a little trash can on my desktop, a dock of currently running apps, and a drawer hidden along the right side of my screen with all my more commonly-used apps. It's just nice to have everything right at your fingertips. | |
