Peter’s Player 1.0 Documentation, last revised 5/4/94
Contents
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1. About Peter’s Player
2. System Requirements
3. QuickTime Basics
4. The Playback Menu
5. Preferences
6. Shortcuts
7. Troubleshooting
8. License
9. Contacting The Author
10. Acknowledgments
About Peter’s Player
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Peter’s Player is an application designed to play QuickTime movies as smoothly as possible, automatically. Just drag a movie onto the Peter’s Player icon from the Finder, or choose one through the “Open…” menu, and the movie will start playing as smoothly as your Mac is capable of.
Peter’s Player uses every method available to get the best playback performance from each movie. It will load the entire movie into RAM if possible, determine the monitor depth the movie was intended for, automatically set your monitor to the closest depth it supports, and hide the standard QuickTime movie controller to eliminate the overhead it introduces. Peter’s Player also provides an option to force every frame of a movie to be displayed, no matter how slow the system, or how large the movie (the movie’s soundtrack will not be played if this option is chosen, though). For optimal dramatic impact (and to make output to video easier), movies are displayed against a black background. You can even hide the menu bar, for total QuickTime immersion!
Finally, Peter’s Player is “accelerated for Power Macintosh,” meaning it runs at the highest possible speed on either 68k or Power Macintosh computers.
System Requirements
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Peter’s Player requires a Macintosh with a 68020 or later processor or a Power Macintosh, System 7.0 or later, the QuickTime™ system extension, and at least 512K of free RAM. 2048K of free RAM and QuickTime version 1.6.1 or later are recommended.
QuickTime Basics
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QuickTime is the name of a system created by Apple Computer to manage data that changes over time. A collection of QuickTime data is called a QuickTime movie. QuickTime currently runs on both Macintosh and Windows computers. Two types of data that QuickTime handles particularly well are video and sound. QuickTime includes routines to compress video and audio information and play them back in “real time,” even on relatively slow computers. Perhaps unfortunately, QuickTime is flexible enough that it is easy to create movies that cannot be played back smoothly on most (or indeed any) current computer hardware.
When QuickTime plays a movie, it does its best to play the movie at the rate the movie-maker intended (typically measured in frames-per-second for video). If a movie has both sound and video, it is particularly important that they both play back at the same rate so that everything happens “in sync.” When a movie contains too much information for the computer to display at the intended pace, QuickTime skips over some of the data, so that what is played back is played at the right time. (When skipping data, QuickTime drops video frames more readily than it drops sound).
In many cases, QuickTime skips frames of video so rarely that the viewer doesn’t notice the loss. When a movie is much too complex for the computer system it is being played on, though, so many frames must be dropped that the movie becomes visibly “jerky,” and the sound starts to break up.
Some of the major factors that govern how smoothly a movie will play back on a given system are:
•The speed of the CPU.
•The medium the movie is being played back from (it is much harder to get good playback from a floppy disk than from a high-speed hard disk array or a RAM disk…)
•The dimensions of the movie (the greater the dimensions, the larger the amount of data that must be copied to the computer screen for each frame of video, and the harder QuickTime must work to keep up).
•The “color depth” (number of bits per pixel) of the movie. QuickTime does a particularly good job displaying movies in 256 colors and “thousands of colors.” Movies generally play best when displayed on a monitor set to the depth they were compressed for.
•The intended playback rate (a movie recorded at 10 frames per second will play back without drop-outs on more systems than one recorded at 30 fps).
•The presence of a soundtrack (movies without soundtracks generally play back more smoothly).
•The compressor used to compress the movie (different compressors offer trade-offs of image quality vs. file size vs. playback speed).
Peter’s Player gets around slow movie media by attempting to load each movie into RAM before playing it. It also detects the bit depth which a movie was intended to be played back at, and sets your monitor to that depth (or the closest approximation it supports). Because of the other factors mentioned above, though, it is possible that some QuickTime movies will still stutter or suffer from significant numbers of dropped frames on your system, even when played back in Peter’s Player. In these cases, Peter’s Player gives you the option of forgetting about the soundtrack and just displaying every frame of the movie in turn, as close to the intended playback rate as possible.
The Playback Menu
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The Playback menu contains options that control how the current movie is displayed. The options are:
Show/Hide Menus
Causes the menu bar to be “blacked out.” Even when the menu bar is hidden, it is still available: just click where it usually is and it will appear. If you are playing back a movie which completely fills the screen and the menus are hidden, this method will not work -- you will need to use command-key equivalents to get to the menu items (the command-key equivalent for “Show Menus” is command-m.)
If you have multiple monitors, Peter’s Player will use the one set to the highest bit depth when the program was launched. If that is not the monitor that has the menu bar, this menu option will be dimmed.
Show/Hide Controller
Causes the standard graphical QuickTime movie “controller” to appear under the movie (or to be hidden if it was showing). Documenting the operation of the controller is beyond the scope of this manual, but most of the controls are pretty self-explanatory. Movies may play back slightly less smoothly when the controller is showing, because the system must spend some of its resources to update the controller as the movie plays.
Loop
If this option is checked, when the open movie reaches its end, it will start playing again from the beginning.
Loop Back and Forth
If this option is checked as well as the “Loop” option, when the open movie reaches the end, it will play backwards until it reaches the beginning, then forwards ‘til the end, …
Half Size
Causes the movie to be played back at half it’s default size in each dimension.
Normal Size
Causes the movie to be played back at the size intended by the movie’s creator(s).
Double Size
Causes the movie to be played back at twice it’s default size in each dimension.
Fill Screen
Causes the movie to fill the entire screen. Because of the uneven scaling necessary to make most movies fill most screens, playback quality is likely to be quite poor when this option is used.
Play Every Frame
Forces QuickTime to display every frame of a movie, even if it means playing the movie back more slowly than intended. When this option is checked, the movie will play silently, whether or not it has a soundtrack.
Set Monitor to Best Depth
When this option is checked, Peter’s Player will examine each movie it opens to see what monitor depth it was intended to be played on, and will set your monitor to that depth (or the closest match it supports) before playing the movie. When you exit Peter’s Player, your monitor will be set back to the depth it was at when you started the program. If you switch to another application, Peter’s Player will restore your original bit depth until you return.
Preferences
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Preferences control the way Peter’s Player behaves each time you launch it, and whenever you open a new movie. Changes made while a movie is open will not affect that movie, instead they will take effect when you open a new one.
Play Immediately
When this preference is checked, movies will start to play as soon as they are opened. If it is not checked, movies will open paused on the first frame, and you will have to make them start playing yourself.
Play Every Frame
When this preference is checked, movies will open in “Play Every Frame” mode. See the description of this option in the Playback Menu section for more details.
Loop
When this preference is checked, newly opened movies will play in a continuous loop. If it is not checked, each movie will stop when it reaches its end.
Show Controller
When this preference is checked, the standard QuickTime movie controller will be visible under each newly-opened movie.
Set Monitor to Best Depth
When this preference is checked, Peter’s Player will try to determine the best monitor depth to play each movie back at, and adjust your monitor accordingly. See the description of the “Set Monitor to Best Depth” option in the Playback Menu section for more details.
Load into RAM
When this preference is checked, Peter’s Player will try to load each movie into RAM before playing it. This yields the smoothest possible playback, but it increases the time it takes large movies to load, and it can lead to an annoying “not enough memory to load this movie” dialog if you try to load a large movie in a small memory partition. If you are running Virtual Memory, you will get the best performance from this option if you allocate less than the amount of physical RAM in your machine to Peter’s Player.
Hide Menu Bar
When this preference is checked, Peter’s Player will start with the menu bar hidden (as long as the monitor with the menu bar is the one set to the highest bit depth—see the “Show/Hide Menus” description in the Playback Menu section for more details).
Shortcuts
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Opening movies
In addition to opening movies from the “Open…” menu item, you can drag the icon of a movie you’d like to open onto the Peter’s Player icon in the finder and let go. If you do, Peter’s Player will open the movie immediately.
Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts
These shortcuts work whether or not the movie controller is visible:
Move forward one frame: right arrow
Move back one frame: left arrow
Go to beginning of movie: option-click left arrow
Go to end of movie: option-click right arrow
Play backwards: command-left arrow
Play/pause: space bar or return key
Play: double click on the movie
Pause: single click on the movie, press command-‘.’ (period)
Increase the volume: up arrow
Decrease the volume: down arrow
Controller Shortcuts
These shortcuts work only when the movie controller is visible:
Adjust playback speed and direction: control-click either step arrow
Go to beginning of movie: option-click Step Backward arrow
Go to end of movie: option-click Step Forward arrow
Play backwards: option-click Step Backward arrow
Turn sound on or off: option-click the speaker icon
Troubleshooting
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Here are likely solutions to problems you may encounter:
No sound is playing.
First, look at the “Play Every Frame” option in the Playback menu. If it’s checked, movies will play silently whether they have a soundtrack or not. If this option isn’t checked, make the movie controller visible (via the “Show Controller” option in the Playback menu) and look at the speaker icon in the left corner of the controller. If it is dimmed, the movie doesn’t have a soundtrack. If it is not dimmed, click on it and you should be able to adjust the movie’s volume.
Help! The menus are gone!
You’ve probably got the “Hide Menus” option checked, either in the Playback menu, or in your preferences. As long as the movie you are playing doesn’t fill the screen, you can just click where the menu bar usually lives and keep the mouse button down until it re-appears. If the movie you are playing fills the screen, press the command and ‘m’ keys simultaneously, and the menu bar will become visible.
My movie isn’t playing back very smoothly.
Unfortunately, some QuickTime movies are just too large or complex to play back smoothly without a very fast Mac, and/or a hardware accelerator. If you’ve got the entire movie loading into RAM, you’re playing the movie back at its default size, your monitor supports the color depth the movie was made for, and there are no other programs running at the same time, there’s not much more that can be done…
I’ve got more than one monitor: how to I tell Peter’s Player which one to use?
When it starts up, Peter’s Player looks for the monitor set to display the highest number of colors, and uses that to display movies on. To indicate which monitor you want it to use, set your preferred monitor to a higher number of colors than the other(s).
When I try to open a movie or look at the preferences or the About… box, nothing happens! What gives?
Take a look in the “Monitors” control panel. If it lists more monitors than you actually have, set the bit depth(s) of the phantom monitor(s) to black & white, and the depth of the main monitor to something higher. The next time you launch Peter’s Player, everything should be O.K.
How do I hide the cursor?
When you use the “Hide Menus” command, the cursor is hidden until you next move the mouse. To re-hide it, just show and hide the menus (hitting command-m twice is the easiest way to do it).
License
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Peter’s Player may be used free-of-charge by any individual. No licensing fee is required to distribute copies so long as the software is unmodified, the original documentation is included with the software, and no fee is charged for the software or any package it is included in, above the costs of media, shipping, and handling.
The software is delivered “as is,” and carries with it no warranties, either express or implied.
Contacting The Author
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If you would like to support further development of Peter’s Player, and you would like to receive notice of future upgrades, please send $20 in US funds to:
Peter E. Lee
39 Canton Ave.
Amherst, MA 01002-1803
USA
For information on commercial or site licenses, or if you have any questions, comments, or requests, I can be reached at the address above, or on-line at:
lee@cs.umass.edu (Internet)
SpecRD (AOL)
Acknowledgments
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Several people provided suggestions, testing, and encouragement without which Peter’s Player would not be in your (virtual) hands now. They are (in alphabetical order): Bill Bachman, Drew Cohan, Andrei Herasimchuk, David Hirmes, Chris Johnston, Adam Lavine, Lincoln Lydick, David Merck, Dan Sroka, David Trescot, and Paul Young. Thanks folks!
Special thanks are also due to Dave Merck for the cool icon, to Specular International, Ltd. for allowing me to use their computers and compilers to build the Power Mac portion of Peter’s Player, and for allowing their employees (myself included) to test it, and to the QuickTime team, for developing such a cool piece of software.
