Go ahead, I'll wait.
Now on to the lazyweb portion of this post.
When I load that page in Safari with (what I suppose is) the plugin that came with WMP 9.0.0, I get a dialog complaining about an unsupported codec. The video plays, but there's no audio. (I gather that WMP 10 exists, but not for Mac.)
If I dig around in the source and save the WMV file to disk, it plays fine in VLC 0.8.2.
So: what's the easy way to go from point A to point B? Doing View Source and grovelling around looking for the URL is a huge waste of time. Surely there's some faster way to get from a web page like this to a VLC window? There doesn't seem to be anything drag-and-droppable, so I guess that means a quest for some random third-party plugin?
Similarly, even when the Quicktime or WMV plugins are working properly, I'd usually rather watch movies in a scaled up standalone window than in a postage stamp embedded in a web page. Surely I'm not the only one? But I guess I must be, since I've yet to see any media-player plugin that has an "open this tiny thing in a resizable fucking window" command built in.
Second: here's a random music video. It's not a very good video and not a very good song, but that's not the point. The point is: it's a QuickTime, and when I play it in QuickTime, I get video but no sound. And when I play it in VLC, I get sound but no video. And I can't see any way to save it to disk at all, even when grovelling in the source.
What's going on here? In what topsy-turvy world does someone publish a QuickTime that won't play on a Mac?
- Update: Well, I re-installed some stuff (from the same installers as last time) and after rebooting, now both of those videos play in Safari, with sound, and without any warning dialogs. I have no explanation. At one point, I had some random RealVideo stream that was also not making sound, and that started working after the reboot too. But it's not that sound was just globally scorched: iTunes was still able to make sound, and I was able to get sound out of various other movie files. It was just certain codecs that were hosed, I guess.
The computers, they hate me.
Third: is there some hack to enable the "Save As" menu on the Quicktime plugin without Apple nickel-and-diming me out of another $30 for QuickTime Pro, 99% of the features of which I'll never use?
