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
4 Responses to “Five Hidden Preferences for Quicktime X”
Thank you for these great tips. Very useful.
great tips, thanks!
what’s left: how to get the controls out from the movie frame…and, by doing that being able to show small movies in ‘actual size’
Any trickery you could come up with ?
You mean having the controls in a separate controller, as for example VLC has? I am not aware of any preference, hidden or otherwise, that allows you to achieve that with Quicktime Player.
That controller on top of your movie for ANY length of time is too long.. what was Apple thinking on that one?