Cool Mac OS X 10.4 Tidbit--Tiger's QuickTime 7 Full Screen Movie Trailers

Have you tried QuickTime 7 yet? Not really tied to Tiger, QuickTime 7 works with Mac OS X 10.3.9 as well as 10.4. One of the features of the new codecs in QuickTime 7 is full screen video, even on older Macs and older graphics cards. In addition, the new QuickTime HD is terrific but needs some serious computing iron to work.

To try out the full screen video, launch QuickTime 7 and in the QuickTime window click on one of the movie trailers. We suggest either "War of the Worlds" or "The Island." The trailers run full screen even on our 450MHz G4 Cube with a stock ATI Rage 128 Pro graphics card with only 16MB VRAM and our 17" Apple Cinema Display. Curiously, they run through the iTunes Music Store.

To try out QuickTime HD with QuickTime 7, go to this Apple Web page and click on one of the HD selections. We suggest "Kingdom of Heaven" or "NASA Space Shuttle" or "WildlifeHD Reel." They run in the QuickTime Player window at full screen width and some with a 16x9 "letter box" aspect ratio. On our Cube the sound comes through fine but not the video. The video comes through very well on our 1.67GHz 17" PowerBook G4 with the processor performance set in the Energy Saver preferences pane on "Highest." Of course, QuickTime HD is absolutely, unbelievably fabulous on our dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 with an Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL graphics card and 30" Cinema Display. [Bill Fox]