Well, time for corrections:
Yesterday, I posted a little article on a finding I did in the morning: QuickTime Player X played .flv files. I just confirmed it was wrong. This is the background of the story:
I had installed Snow Leopard (WWDC release) last Friday, rather quickly as I was in a hurry. When I came back yesterday, I found a "Previous System Folder", which I promptly deleted. Thus I assumed I had done a clean install of Snow Leopard. Then I started digging around in Snow Leopard, and much to my surprise, I found it played .flv files. Since I had not seen that fact reported anywhere, and considered it of significant interest to many Mac users, I emailed John Gruber (author of Daring Fireball) to let him know.
In the evening, I had received quite a few comments to the previous article in the blog, suggesting I had Perian installed (providing the ability to play .flv files in QuickTime Player), but that QuickTime Player X does not play natively .flv files. Since I had read them at home, I couldn't check the comments until this morning. And this is what I did when arriving at work. And as suggested by many comments, effectively, I had Perian installed, enabling the .flv playback in QuickTime. Which means I had not done a clean install (but then, I can't understand where the "Previous System Folder" came from).
So, to summarize:
1. NO, QuickTime Player X DOES NOT support natively the playback of .flv video files.
2. I apologize to all readers who were confused by my previous article on this topic. I posted it honestly convinced it was true and of interest to other people. So I am sorry for the confusion. Next time I find something this exciting, I will double check before making any announcement, instead of letting my excitation take over.
3. I am really surprised by the huge noise made by this little comment from me. The take home message (for Apple) is that there is a very strong interest in the community of Mac users to see such native support for .flv playback in OS X and QuickTime. And if I was responsible of the development of OS X, I would hurry up to include such support in Snow Leopard before its final release after the summer.
Tuesday, 16 June 2009
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4 comments:
If you had a 'previous system' folder, you did an 'archive and install'. The only clean install is an 'erase and install'.
I think the noise is consistent with what happens when an article is posted on TechCrunch about anything really. So you can probably thank MC Siegler for most of your traffic.
I personally don't think there's any need to support .flv (as in Sorenson and VP6 codecs) when H264 is far superior and works in Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight. Even if your target market is Flash, a H264 encoded .mp4 is the most sensible choice at the moment (supported by Flash since 2007). Those producing content should be given incentives to move into the future, not stay in the past.
Well, strangely enough, yesterday I did another install of WWDC Snow Leopard, and I couldn't find the option of "Archive and install". Apparently all it does is updating the previous system, something I had never found before in OS X.
As for "thanking for my traffic", there's nothing to thank for: I am not looking for traffic, I prefer quality readers than massive amounts of readers.
Finally, I agree with you on that H.264 is the way to go. But fact is that, at this very time, most video sites use .flv, and thus supporting it natively in QuickTime, iPhone and iPod touch seems a very good idea to me.
Well hey, theres a plugin for that which works in Snow leopards Quicktime X
http://perian.org/
I have perian installed on my machine along with snow leopard and can't play flv files at all - any advice?
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