Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

QuickTime

The settings in the QuickTime panel affect the way movies are played back on your Mac, including movies that stream to you from a Web page and movies that you watch using QuickTime Player (Chapter 15).

You don't have to touch most of these options, but here are a few worth tweaking:

• Register. Fill in the blanks to upgrade to QuickTime Pro; see Chapter 15.

• Browser. These settings control how your Web browser's QuickTime plug-in works with streaming video. "Play movies automatically," for example, tells the plug-in to start playing movies as soon as they begin downloading, rather than wait for the entire movie to download first. (If you have a dial-up Internet connection, you'll probably want this turned off to keep the incoming movie from stuttering.)

• Update. These controls provide an easy way to download the latest QuickTime software version.

• Streaming. Some streaming QuickTime Web sites are set up with multiple versions of the same movie, each saved at a different size and frame rate. Based on your connection speed setting here, the QuickTime plug-in can automatically request the appropriately sized version of a movie for the best possible playback. Usually, Automatic—a new Tiger feature—detects the speed, saving you the trouble of muddling with the pop-up menu.

  The Enable Instant-On feature means that you can begin watching a streaming QuickTime movie before it's been fully downloaded.

  However, this feature works because QuickTime analyzes how fast the movie data is arriving ...