I’m often asked how to present a movie to a secondary monitor on a mac using Quicktime. Say you have a Macbook with a larger monitor plugged into it (say 20″) and you’d like to present the movie full-screen in quicktime on that larger monitor.
You can do this from the “view” menu in quicktime, choose “present movie” then select the monitor you’d like to present on, and set any other options. Handy!
How annoying is it when you have a video file you want to play back and it just wont work because Quicktime says NO.
Get yourself the right codecs and you will be in business.
Media these days can come in a variety of formats, encoded different ways using different methods. Popular ones include DivX, Xvid, wmv, and mkv. None of these formats will play in Quicktime “out of the box”. You will need to install a few extras to get the functionality you need.
Popular Codecs:
Perian is a great codec that plays back a variety of formats, including the popular divx/xvid formats. This is my favourite codec and an absolute must for anyone that wants to use Quicktime as their media player software. Taken from their web site, “Perian is a free, open source QuickTime component that adds native support for many popular video formats.” Cool!
Flip4Mac is a great bit of of software for the playback of wmv files. wmv files are popular with windows users, and a lot of high definition material is encoded in this format. You’ll want flip4mac if you intend to play these files on your mac with Quicktime
Others:
AC3
K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of VFW/ACM codecs, DirectShow filters and tools. Codecs and DirectShow filters are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video formats. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular audio and video formats and even several less common formats.
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