Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks, Second Edition

Chapter 6. Multimedia

Since its introduction, the Macintosh has earned a reputation as a strong computing platform for multimedia applications. With the maturation of Mac OS X and its support for open source applications, coupled with Apple’s Digital Hub strategy, the Macintosh has become an even better choice for multimedia applications.

This chapter highlights a few multimedia applications that may be especially interesting to those Mac OS X users who have used similar (and in some cases, the same) applications in Linux and/or various flavors of Unix. We begin with a brief discussion on how to burn CDs in Mac OS X, both using GUI and command-line tools. The chapter then moves on to discuss some familiar (to Linux/Unix users) open source and bundled applications for playing videos, image editing, and 3D modeling.

Burning CDs

There are several ways to burn CDs in Mac OS X. Which method of CD-burning you should use depends largely on what kind of data you are burning to the CD. Let’s consider an example in which we’ll use a CD-R to backup ~/Library/Mail, which is where your mailboxes are stored if you use the Mac OS X Mail application. The same procedure can be applied to other data. We’ll discuss how to accomplish this task with the GUI-based Disk Utility application located in /Applications/Utilities and by using the command line in Terminal. In either case, you should make a disk image before burning your data to a CD-R.

To make a disk image of ~/Library/Mail using Disk Utility, ...