A major feature of Snow Leopard is QuickTime X, Apple’s media player and core technology that powers the audio and video in OS X. QuickTime has been said to have been rewritten from the ground up, and the changes sound mouth watering.
Starting with cosmetic changes, the first obvious thing is the gorgeous new icon. I think it’s the best icon I’ve seen in quite some time. Getting past such trivial details, the QuickTime player interface has been changed, chipping off the edges and adding the controls inside in a floating HUD. All this, including the title bar, fades away leaving you with a single floating block of video, which looks out of this world.
QuickTime sheds its Pro pricetag, making it accessible for everyone. About time if you ask me. This will go well with the new support for editing and uploading to YouTube and MobileMe. QuickTime X also features the much talked about screen recording feature, which allows you to make instructional videos a.k.a. screencasts using just QuickTIme.
Under the hood QuickTime has gained some serious horsepower. It’s got GPU accelerated decoding for H264 video, and exploits all of the newer features of Snow Leopard like Grand Central and 64bit computing. QuickTime also has support for HTTP streaming, something that I personally didn’t understand much of. For more info check out the QuickTime section on the Snow Leopard page.
