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I was rather P.O.'d when upgrading to Mac OS X 10.4 promptly broke the
QuickTime Pro functionality I'd already paid for. It seemed ridiculous
to have to pay another $30 on top of what I'd already paid for Tiger and
QuickTime Pro 6 just to play my movies in full screen, so I decided to
do something about it.
I'm happy to announce QuickTime Amateur, an open source clone of Apple's
QuickTime Player written in Java. You can find it here:
It's completely uncrippled and free (both as-in-beer and as-in-speech).
Currently this has only been tested, designed, and run on the mac,
though a Windows port is on the TODO list.
Currently it's rather rough, and not all the functionality is there yet.
Saving, in particular, needs a lot of work. However if you just want to
play your movies in full screen mode without paying $30, it's good
enough to do that now. Various other Pro functionality such as printing,
editing, and copying and pasting movies is also enabled. If you just
want to use it you can get a disk image here:
I will eventually work my way through these, but that could take a
while. If anyone wants to help out, please do. Your assistance is much
appreciated. Making Save As work properly is the most immediate need. I
know how to save a movie. What I haven't yet figured out how to do is
remember where the movie was put, so that future saves will put it in
that file rather than the file that was opened. Also so that the window
title can be updated.
In hindsight, basing this on QuickTime for Java+Swing may have been a
mistake. There are some things I can't seem to do in QTJ I probably
could do in straight QuickTime+Cocoa+Objective C. However, I'm,
committed now. Possibly I'll have to write some glue code to connect
back to the native APIs over JNI or the Cocoa-Java bridge rather than
going through QTJ. This remains to be seen. The program is functional
now, though; and could improve quickly. If nothing else, the source base
should serve as a really nice collection of examples of how you do much
pretty much anything in QuickTime for Java.
Comments and suggestions are appreciated. If you find bugs or have ideas
for features that go beyond what QuickTime Player provides, please enter
them in the issue tracker. Thanks!
