Why another one?

My family likes to watch movies on our Mac in fullscreen mode. Unfortunately QuickTime Player itself supports this feature only in the Pro mode, which is not free. There is whole bunch of players that provides fullscreen playback for free, but they lack one or another feature we very much like our player to have. So I thought - I'm developer myself, why don't I give it a try? This might be a good 'overnight' project :). My goal was to make it to be as simple in usage as possible, yet powerful and configurable for the one's needs. Here is short recap of the features supported:

• Fullscreen movie playback
• Playlist, sort, shuffle, looping
• Resume unfinished playlist
• Subtitles support, custimizable encoding, frame rate
• Full control of the movie size
• Really fast forward/rewind
• Advanced volume control
• Simple, one touch, keyboard control
• Controller for mouse playback control
• Apple Remote support
• Preferences dialog for advanced control of appearance
• New version check

 

System Requirements

It should work with Mac OS X version 10.2 and up. Besides Quick Time, that installed with Mac OS X by default, you might need additional codecs to play some of the movies (such as AVI encoded with DivX codec for example). You can find links to most popular codecs on our Links page. Starting with version 0.4b5 Movie Time is built as Universal Binary so it will run natively on Intel Macs. Please note, that you will need Universal Binaries of Quick Time codecs to run with Universal Binary of Movie Time. If you need to play movie that encoded with codec, that has only PPC version, you can select to launch Movie Time under Rosetta in Finder Get Info window.

 

Playing Movies

You can open movie by dropping movie file onto the application's icon.
If you launching Movie Time by double-click, it automatically starts last played movie from the position it was playing when application quit. If you don't like this, in preferences you can choose to launch File Open panel on every startup instead.
At any time you can use Command+O to bring up File Open panel, and open another movie.
If you switching to another application, by default, Movie Time remains visible, but movie playback is paused. You can change this behavior in preferences (Hidden when inactive and Paused when inactive options).
Dropping folders or disks on application's icon is not supported at this time, but planned for a future releases.
If you opening multiple movies they composed into virtual playlist.
Starting version 0.3b2 you can also drop folders or disks onto the application icon or window (or select in File Open panel). Movie Time will scan entire folder or disk content, find all supported movies and add them to playlist. Keep in mind that scanning huge folders or disks can take a lot of time, so think twice before dropping onto Movie Time your startup volume ;)!
Now you also can Fast Forward or Fast Rewind by pressing Right or Left Arrow while movie is playing. (When movie is paused, it will step frame by frame, as it did before.) It will start at x2 rate. You then may increase rate by subsequently pressing correspondent button. After each press rate is doubled, i.e. x4, x8, x16, ... up to x128. Be careful with increasing rate too high. It gets away fine at x128 on G5 2x2GHz 1.5GB RAM, but it can hang on slower machines even at lower rate. Pressing Space Bar will resume playback at normal rate.
Starting 0.3b6 you can jump backward and forward arbitrary amount of time by pressing Control+Left and Control+Right Arrow . Default jump interval is 10 seconds. On the General tab of the preferences dialog you can change interval from 1 to 999 seconds.

 

Open URL

In Movie Time v0.4b4 support for opening of the movie URLs was added. Choose File->Open URL (or Command+U) to bring up panel to open single URL. If you want to open several URLs simultaneously to form playlist you may choose File -> Open URLs (or Command+Shift+U). Playing movies from the URLs is the work in progress, and does not work very well, especially for the several movies in playlist.

 

Virtual Playlist

Movies in playlist are played automatically one by one. By default, the playlist is sorted by file names, numerically (i.e. a1, a2, ... a10, a11, ... a20, etc., as opposite to literally i.e. a1, a10, a11, ... a2, a20, a21, ... a3, etc.). In preferences, you can turn off sorting and rely on order the Finder passes multiple files to Movie Time. You also can disable numerical sorting, or choose to sort using full path. The last one might be useful when, for example, names of the folders should affect actual order in which movies should be played (i.e. /list1/movie1.mov, /list1/movie2.mov, /list2/movie1.mov, /list2/movie2.mov).
You can navigate to beginning or end of the current movie by pressing Option+Left or Option+Right Arrow. By pressing Command+Left or Command+Right Arrow you can navigate to previous or next movie in playlist.
If you hold down Option key at the time you dropping new files onto Movie Time window, icon or when clicking Open button in File Open panel, files will be added to current playlist. Otherwise current playlist will be replaced by the new movie(s).
Starting from version 0.3b4 you can set playlist to shuffle, turn on looping for whole playlist or current movie only. You also able turn off (it is on by default) automatic playlist start, switch to next movie, quit after playlist finished.

 

Volume control

Volume control switched from standard QuickTime to custom. Now volume increments in 10% steps (not QuickTime's 25%) and I'm thinking of allowing to change resolution from the preferences (not in this release though). Also it can go way beyond 100%, thus allowing you to get the desired volume without touching system volume controls. Also you can achieve desired balance between the volume of system sounds and volume of the movie. How this is possible? Well, Movie Time volume, (as well as QuickTime BTW) is relative volume, not absolute. So at 100% it is equal to system volume at 50% it is half of system volume, at 200% it is doubles system volume.
Couple of things to remember though. Current release does not set the higher bound for the volume. Mainly because I did not decided yet what it should be. I guess you can burn your speakers or sound card by increasing volume TOO HIGH (also I didn't tried this myself). So use your head, and don't blame me afterwards.
From the other hand, if you set your system volume too low, and Movie Time volume too high, you will hear sound distortion (this is kinda obvious). Also, now Option+Up Arrow kinda lost it's sense as 'Maximum Volume' as there is no 'maximum', so for now it is just '100% volume' and it might be changed in future releases.
You can mute sound by pressing M. Press M again to turn mute off.
Starting 0.3b6 you can choose to save volume between launches on the General tab of the preferences dialog.

 

Subtitles

Movie Time, by default, tries to fetch known subtitle files automatically. (You can turn this option off in preferences). So far, three text subtitles formats is supported - SubRip (extension .srt), MicroDVD (extension .sub), TMPlayer (extension .txt), and one bitmap subtitles format - VobSub (pair of files with .idx and .sub extensions, also .sub file can be compressed with RAR¹). More will come in the future releases.
To be opened automatically, subtitle file should have the same name as the movie file and have one of the following extensions: .srt or .sub, and anything (or nothing) in between. This method allows you to have virtually unlimited number of subtitle files accompanying movie and gives you flexibility of naming. So for example, you can have several language translation subtitles, and conveniently name them: MyMovie.English.srt, MyMovie.English.forced.srt, MyMovie.French.srt, MyMovie.German.srt, MyMovie.Russian.srt etc. All this files will be automatically loaded with MyMovie.avi.
Subtitles are rendered with font size dependent on movie size. Subtitles will have maximum size, (the one you specify in preferences), when movie is playing in the Fullscreen mode. If the Normal or Half movie size smaller than Fullscreen size, subtitles font size is scaled down proportionally until it reaches the minimum size. You can change minimum font size at the Advanced tab in preferences. At the Subtitles tab in preferences you can also change subtitles color and font face. Subtitles can be rendered with shadow, to better distinguish them from movie background. At the Subtitles tab in preferences you can turn shadow on or off, change its color, blur radius, and offset. There you also choose to display subtitles over background and, set background color, transparency (from the color pane), make it have rounded corners with configurable radius, turn on or off frame and change it's width.
If you have multiple subtitle files you can cycle though them by pressing S key (holding Shift will change direction). Each subsequent key press switches to the next subtitle file, when reaches end of list - turns subtitles off, next press - subtitles on, start from the beginning of the list.
Starting 0.3b3 you can change in preferences default subtitles Encoding and Frame Rate. Choosing the encoding allows to display correctly subtitles in languages other than English. Any encoding supported by the Mac OS can be chosen as default encoding. As there is lots of them, for you convenience Encodings popup in preferences contains 10 most recent encodings used. If you need different encoding, choose More Encodings and there you will find full list of supported encodings.
Default encoding could be changed 'on the fly'. When you change encoding, current (and only current) subtitles file converted to this encoding. All files that will be opened after change was made will use new encoding. All subtitles that was opened before, will preserve original encoding. (Subtitles file gets opened when you switch first time to display subtitles from this file). This way you can have simultaneously opened files with different encodings.
To support .sub subtitles format, setting default Frame Rate was added. Default value is 'Same as movie'. This will work for most cases (when you prepared your subtitles together with movie). If for some reason you need different setting - you can override it in preferences. As with default encoding, changing default fps will have immediate effect on current subtitle, and on all subtitle files that will be loaded after change.

¹ Uses freeware UNRAR © 1993-2005 Alexander Roshal

 

Keyboard Feedback

To help you to associate keyboard controls with their actions there is feedback window that appears on the screen with brief information about action performed. It is especially useful for actions with variable parameters such as changing volume, fast forwarding at various speeds, jumping, because feedback shows you current value. By default keyboard feedback turned on, but you can turn it off in preferences. Starting 0.3b6 you have full control of the feedback overlay appearance. Now you can change text color, font, size, shadow, background etc. It is pretty similar to subtitles overlay controls. In addition you can choose positioning of the overlay on the screen from the combination of three vertical and horizontal positions.

 

Status Display

Status Display will provide you with information about currently playing clip, state of some controls etc. You can press D to bring first page of Status Display. Next press of D switches to the next display and so on. After last status page display overlay fades out. If you hold Shift key, displays will switch backwards. Currently implemented status pages:

• Time - Displays elapsed/total time of the current clip
• Movie - Displays file name of the current clip
• Subtitles - Displays current subtitle file name
• Loop - Displays current looping settings
• Volume - Displays current volume level

In the preferences you can change appearance of the Status Display overlay same as for Kevboard Feedback Overlay. Starting 0.3b6 you can choose in preferences to save overlay state.

 

New version checking

Movie Time can automatically check for new version. On the first launch you will see the alert box allowing you to enable this feature. By default checking period is set to check for new version once a week.
You can check for new version manually by pressing Command+Option+N. If there is new version available you will see an alert message. When you click on 'Download Now...' button you will be navigated to the download page. You may choose to click on 'Skip Version' button if you don't want to download this version, and Movie Time will not bother you, until newer version became available. By default beta version will always check for both new beta or release version.
You need internet connection for this feature to work.
From the Advanced tab of the preferences dialog you can turn automatic version checking on or off, change checking period and manually check for new version. There you can also see when last version check was performed and current status. You also can turn off checking for beta version, although we don't recommend to do so. As practice shows, it is long way to the release version, and you don't want to miss all the new features introduced regularly as beta versions.
Please note, that no information is transferred to the server during this procedure. Only tiny XML file containing information about the latest version is downloaded from the server and this information is compared with current version that you have locally.

 

Multiple monitors support

Version 0.4b7 introduced support for multiple monitors. If you have more than one monitor connected to your computer you can switch between monitors by pressing Tab (holding Shift will change direction). Movie Time will remember last monitor used and next time will use it for playback unless it was disconnected.

 

Preferences

You can bring up preferences dialog by pressing Command+, at any time. Most of the settings are applied 'on the fly'. This means, for example, that you will see subtitles color actually changing while changing it in the Color Picker panel, and you don't have to click 'OK' button to confirm your changes.

 

Keyboard Shortcuts

If you forget one of the keyboard shortcuts, you can look it up at any time in the Help window. Press Command+? to bring up help window. You can also find full list of shortcuts below:

 

Apple Remote Support

Version 0.4b5 introduced support for Apple Remote ². Default actions:

Currently, there is no way to modify default actions. I will work on it in one of the future releases.

² Based on sources kindly provided by Martin Kahr http://www.martinkahr.com

 

Performance Tips

Movie Time uses the QuickTime engine to play movies, therefore if your computer is not powerful enough to play movie smoothly, there is little what you can do to improve playback by itself. From the other hand, subtitles are rendered on top of the movie, so it takes up some of processor power (not much though). Here are some tips on improving performance:

• Try to reduce size of the movie on screen - choose Normal size (this usually would be smaller than your screen size) or even Half size.
• Try to reduce subtitles font size so they do not overlap the movie (if you have space below the movie).
• Try to turn off subtitles.
• Try to turn off status display, keyboard feedback, especially if it is overlaps movie.

 

Bug Reporting

Submit your bug reports to movietime@macmail.com.

If you reporting a bug, please, along with the bug description provide basic information about your computer: processor type and clock speed, amount of physical memory, version of Mac OS X you have, version of QuickTime, basic information on movie you have tried to play.

If the bug is related to Movie Time crash, please send a crashlog along with your bug report. See FAQ if you don't know how to get crash log.

If you don't mind to spend a little time to help me understand your problem better, please, consider generating extended log to console. To do so while being in Movie Time, open Preferences dialog, turn on Generate extended log to console and quit Movie Time. Then open the Console application (/Applications/Utilities/Console), clear the Console display (choose Edit->Clear Display from menu or press Command+K). Launch Movie Time again and try to reproduce your bug. After reproducing, quit Movie Time, switch back to console, copy all content of console.log window and paste it in a mail with a bug report. If log is too big for the mail body, you can save copy of the log as separate file and send it as attachment to the mail with a bug report. Don't forget to turn Generate extended log to console off in Movie Time preferences when you are done.

 

Distribution

Feel free to share Movie Time with your friends. You can freely redistribute Movie Time in form of original, unmodified Disk Image (.dmg) by itself or as part of FREE software package distribution. You cannot distribute Movie Time with commercial software packages without previous written consent from the author. Please, let me know if you like to host Movie Time download on your server, so I ensure you will always have the latest version available. If you like to put link for Movie Time download on your site, please do not hot-link, use link to Download page instead.