Here at Digital Dazzle, the free vlc media player has long been our major work-horse for video playback. QuicktimeX is way too limited and Quicktime 7, while pretty good, is still no match for vlc.
With the release of version 2, vlc has even gotten better. Most importantly to us, we can now use Apple's Magic Trackpad as a secondary input device for vlc (we've long used a wired mouse as the main pointing device to the right of the keyboard and the trackpad as a secondary device to the left of the keypad.) It requires a change deep down in vlc's preference settings (Preferences -> Show All -> Interface -> Hotkey Settings -> Hotkeys, then set Mouse Wheel to "Position Control"), but once it is set, you can use the vertical two-finger swipe to scrub through a video. Even better, it is touch-sensitive - the faster you swipe, the faster you scrub through the video. Awesome!
The only downside so far - when starting a new video, it resizes the interface to the native video size without taking anamorphic settings into account. A quick press of cmd-1 fixes this, but it would be great, if that wouldn't be required, like it wasn't in version 1. I'm sure there's some settings buried deep down in the preferences to turn off this behavior, so if you know what the setting is, we'd appreciate a quick note.
Overall, though - a great program has gotten better. We're happy!
No comments:
Post a Comment