bloganstalt

Apple’s latest movie player is quite the looker with its no-window, all-video design, but when it comes to making it bow to your will, you seem to be out of luck. It does not even have a preference menu — okay, we get it Apple: it’s take it or leave it.

Not so! Here’s five hidden preferences to remove some common annoyances and make Quicktime Player X more pleasant to use:

Make the controller bar hide more quickly

This is actually the first secret preference for a mac app I’ve found on my own — yay strings!

The controller — the little bar containing the play/pause/forward/rewind buttons — sticks around a bit too long after you have stopped moving your mouse, obscuring the movie you’re trying to watch. Luckily,

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGUIVisibilityTimeout 1

makes it fade out after one only second.

Thanks to rorschach from the MacRumors forums for these other four tips:

Play movies automatically on open

This one drove me nuts, and I don’t understand why this isn’t the default: to have your movies playing automatically right after opening them, enter

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGPlayMovieOnOpen 1

Disable the rounded corners

If you prefer to see every last pixel of your video clip, down to the corners, enter

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoRoundedCorners 1

Show subtitles and closed captions automatically

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGEnableCCAndSubtitlesOnOpen 1

Allow multiple screen recordings at the same time

If you need to capture your desktop into multiple videos in parallel, this is for you:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGAllowMultipleSimultaneousRecordings 1