Getting started with QuickTime Player X
As a newish Mac user, you may wonder what allows your computer to display pictures and play music and movies. Wonder no longer. This bit of media magic is performed by something called QuickTime. Originally developed in 1991 as a multimedia technology that accompanied the System 6 operating system, QuickTime has been built in to every version of the Mac’s operating system since.
Before we take another step, let’s a peer a little more carefully into what QuickTime is and isn’t. As I’ve outlined up to this point, QuickTime is a technology rather than an application. If you think of the Mac OS as a series of blocks, each of which is part of the sturdy wall that is the Macintosh computing experience, QuickTime would be one layer of those blocks. When the operating system needs to play media, it looks to this QuickTime layer to do the job.
However, when you hear people talking about QuickTime on their Mac, they’re invariably speaking of the QuickTime Player application. Before iTunes came along, QuickTime Player is how most people watched movies on their Macs. And that player what we’ll talk about in this lesson.
The anatomy of QuickTime Player
Launch QuickTime Player (which is found in the Applications folder at the root level of your startup drive) and…well, nothing much happens. You’ll see the QuickTime Player name appear next to the Apple logo in the Mac’s menu bar, along with QuickTime Player’s menus, but that’s about it. For the application to actually do something, you need to open a media file that QuickTime can play. You have many to choose from.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
http://www.macworld.com/article/2045897/getting-started-with-quicktime-player-x.html#tk.rss_all
