Membranophonist’s Ramblings

A few comments for Many Tricks’ yFlicks, a video player and organizer for Mac OS X.

1. A first-launch-only prompt to import the user’s movies (searching based on UTIs or whatever magic is required) and perhaps user-selectable locations would help them immerse themselves in the application. Creating groups from folders might help them orient themselves by carrying over their existing arrangement.
2. An option to set up folders to monitor for new videos would be nice. Sensible defaults could include ~/Movies and the user’s Safari Downloads folder and whichever other folders the user picks at first launch (should such an option be presented).
3. Allow drag-and-drop to the main pane; it is usually a much easier target because of its size (Fitts’ Law).
4. Group renaming is quirky. Double-clicking quickly does not engage the rename mode, but single-clicking a selected group does. The Enter key should also activate rename mode.
5. Command-Left Arrow and Command-Right Arrow should be bound to opening and closing the group folders.
6. The active group’s name should be displayed in the window titlebar. This is particularly useful if the Library pane is hidden, leaving no visual indication of which group is active.
7. Display metadata embedded in QT files. At least Title! Please! Director and Performers would also be nice.
8. Center the movie thumbnails within the right pane.
9. Retain the main window’s size across launches (ideally, in a relative way so that it can adapt to different screen setups, but I don’t know if that is feasible with available OS X technologies).
10. Allow multi-select and contextual menu star rating assignment. Having to rate videos individually is tedious if you have a large existing collection.
11. Clicking the Hide Library button in the lower left moves the right pane over, triggering the preview playback of the bottom left movie. This seems to be a bug with calculating the position of screen elements.
12. I dig the mouseover video previews, but I think the delay should be increased by a wee bit to prevent them from starting unintentionally.

As part of a series of Mac Pro performance tests before putting down for a new system, I watched the 1080p trailer for The Departed, looking for smoothness in playback and scaling. No problems there, but I did catch a mighty fugly interface in the trailer itself.

Screen 1: Windows Explorer tree, buttons stolen from Safari, Graphite theme scrollbar (1 MB).

Screen 2: Mini Mac window widgets, goofily labeled Aqua drop-down menus (1.32 MB).

I guess the budget all went to the parade of stars.

As with all annotations and chapter titles, it would be nice to have QuickTime video subtitles indexed by Spotlight. I have no clue as to the technical feasibility of this, but the text of the displayed frame is searchable within QuickTime Player (Command-R), so I would think it could be done.

1. I am trying to recall a labor statistic that Stephen Colbert mentioned on his show. I know he used the specific phrase “Labor Department”, so I enter that in the Spotlight search field.
2. The subtitled QuickTime movie appears in the result list.
   
3. Opening the movie automatically moves to the point at which the phrase “Labor Department” first appears.
   

If both a chapter and subtitle contained the same text, I think the subtitle should be given more weight; it is more specific and likely easier for the user to put in context.

I forgot to include the action menus in my previous mockup of a revised QuickTime Player Info window, so here it is:

I also fixed the alignment of the top and bottom section labels.

WordPress 2.0 is nice!

Continuing my exploration of QuickTime’s metadata capabilities, I’ve been using Metadata Hootenanny to add chapters to videos ripped with HandBrake. Chapters are similar to the Scene Selection or Index screens on DVDs, allowing you to jump to points in the video without having to scrub. Handy, but chapters aren’t as useful as they could be.

Chapter Title Indexing

Like a lot of QuickTime metadata, chapter titles are not indexed by Spotlight. Here’s how it should work:

1. The user types “Impressions” into Spotlight
2. Because the chapter titles are indexed, the Coltrane tribute video I’ve imported appears in the results list:
3. Rather than the beginning, QuickTime Player opens the video at the chapter whose title contains “Impressions”, similar to how Preview opens PDFs to the first page containing a query string:
   

Chapter Display

The pop-up menu is functional, but it doesn’t provide any visual or much linear context:

To provide such information, a drawer like that in Preview for multi-page PDFs could be used. Drawer haters can stick with the pop-up menu, but it would be nice for videos with 25+ chapters. The drawer would look something like this:

• The thumbnails could play a few seconds of video when moused over, playing audio only if the open movie was not already.
• Display of the drawer could be toggled via a View menu command or the keyboard using Shift-Command-C.

Chapter Editing

They would probably be buttheads and make it a Pro feature, but a way to edit chapters in QT Player without having to write a text file (gadzooks!) would be great.

• Users could create chapter markers by dragging video frames to the drawer, selecting Add Chapter from the Edit menu, or using a keyboard shortcut (Option-Command-C is available).
• After dropping a frame in the drawer (or using the keyboard shortcut), a name input field would immediately come into focus.
• Given the strictly linear nature, chapters would auto-arrange with a sliding animation.
• Users would be free to edit the chapters of purchased videos; they wouldn’t be modifying content, so preventing it would just be a needless imposition of the creator’s organization.

QuickTime Player improved with QT7, but there are still plenty of lingering problems.

Playback Windows

Generally, I’d use the new iTunes look instead of brushed metal. Clickable side margins might be useful, but there is a lot of space at the bottom of movie windows that can be used to move them.

The status area would use the subtle gradient seen in iTunes 6 and adopt a few of the behaviors used there:

1. Annotations (except the title, which is always displayed in the window titlebar) would be displayed above the playback scrubber, rotating through (automatically or when clicked) the director, composer, writer, etc. Performers would have to be displayed one at a time.
2. Clicking the enclosed triangle widget at the left of the status area would toggle the display of the level meters that are currently displayed at the right of the playback scrubber.

The Movie Info Window

Here is the current Movie Info window:

It’s as though the top and bottom sections of the Movie Info window were designed by different people.

Here is my design:

My Info window clearly labels movie annotations and allows the sections to be hidden by clicking on the header section or rearranged by dragging the handle at the right edge.

Annotation Access

Not all of the movie annotations are available through the Properties window. Instead, you have to use Automator or another tool to access things like Director and Performers.

The post title is a reference to one of my favorite albums, D’Angelo’s Voodoo, available at the iTunes Music Store or Amazon.

As of 10.4.3, Spotlight indexes only a few QuickTime video annotations, which I use to add metadata to videos downloaded from Crooks and Liars and vlogs accessed through DTV. Relocating videos is easier when they have structured metadata that is indexed and searchable.

The below table does not include every annotation available and many of the generic metadata mappings are suggestions based on the descriptions of existing kMD mappings. The new QuickTime metadata format documentation explicitly names a few mappings; the rest are based on the syntax.

A few related thoughts

• I believe Apple will release a real video manager sometime in the near future. iTunes is my preferred music manager, but it is a lousy video manager.
• A video manager that would handle television show episodes and feature films would need a more flexible metadata infrastructure than the old QuickTime annotation system, hence the extensible system introduced with QuickTime 7.
• Download distribution rights for all of Pixar’s feature films are probably part of Jobs’ negotiations with Disney. They’ve already been (more than) amortized, so why not sell them through the online video store for four or five dollars? Pixar, Apple, and Disney all get a cut and Apple gets some quality content to launch feature film sales.

To illustrate a bug in Apple’s Preview 3.0 concerning the display of image dimensions, I will use the Man of the Hour, I. Lewis “Five Indictments” Libby:

As you can see in the Document Info window, the dimensions are 200 x 297.

Now I crop the image a bit and save the changes to disk…

The image dimensions don’t update until the image is reopened.

How cropping the image increased the file size is a mystery to me.

With version 6 (more like 5.1), iTunes has reached the bloating point. The video integration is clumsy and playback performance is awful compared to QuickTime Player on the exact same hardware. Good thing you can pretty much make it disappear and use it as what it is: an audio player.

Video is not Audio

1. Why didn’t Apple create a more specialized info window for video? They added a “Video Kind” selection menu in the Options section, but the window is not otherwise redesigned for video.
   1. Episode and season numbers are not track numbers, a cast is not an artist, and a show is not an album.
   2. Why isn’t video information like resolution, codec, and frames per second displayed in the Summary section of the info window?
   3. Some would probably find it useful to store transcripts of videos in the Lyrics section so that they could use text searching (which still doesn’t search lyrics) to find quotes and build Smart Playlists, but it is disabled.
2. You can sort the thumbnail view any way you like as long as it is by name. Update: the video sorting order set in the list view is respected in thumbnail view, so you can sort them by other properties. So you can sort them by rating, but you can’t see the ratings in thumbnail view. Still a poor implementation.
3. You can assign ratings, but you can only see them in the list view.
4. The Title annotation set in QuickTime Player is not used as the Name in iTunes, which defaults to the movie file’s name.
5. Movies cannot be added by dropping them on either the Videos source list entry or the actual display area.
6. The nomenclature is wrong: the artwork pane reads “Selected Song” and the contextual menu “Show Song File” when a video is selected.

The video features feel tacked on; an afterthought. This comes as no surprise given that the application was designed for audio… It makes some sense to manage music videos in iTunes because they can be pretty cleanly placed within the existing organizational structure, but I don’t believe it works well with other video content. Television shows are organized by show/season/episode, movies by genre/title or director. What I want is a combination of the three following applications:

• MovieGallery
• iFlicks
• iVideo

No single application has the right combination of good visual design (MovieGallery & iVideo) and plentiful metadata (iFlicks), an understandable situation given that MovieGallery and iFlicks have only a single developer and Waterfall Software is a young and small company (whose next product I am looking forward to).

General iTunes Problems

Some of these have been around for a while, some arrived with version 5.

1. The Search Bar filters available cannot be modified. Comment and Lyrics (which ought to be indexed) would be particularly useful additions. Contextual menu commands or column header drag-and-drop would be two ways to add search filters. Removal could be handled similarly to standard toolbar buttons; Command-drag to remove or via the contextual menu.
2. Users should be able to drag browser groups (Genres, Artists, and Albums) to folders.
3. Users should be able to use Lyrics as Smart Playlist rules.
4. Users should be able to drag-and-drop playlists to export them in the default XML format.
5. The Smart Playlist editor window has little keyboard accessibility support; with full keyboard access on, I can only tab between the available text input boxes — no pop-up menus or checkboxes.
6. The Search field should provide a contextual menu so an iTunes query can easily be sent to Spotlight as a system-wide query. This is useful in Mail, so it might as well be available consistently. Before I forget, the Finder should also do this rather than displaying toolbar customization commands.
7. The tabbing order is different from Mail. Starting in the search field:

   Mail:

   1. Search field
   2. Source list
   3. Main content pane (message list)

   iTunes:

   1. Search field
   2. Main content pane (track list or left-most browser column)
   3. Source list
8. For those who do not like to take their hands off the keyboard, it would be nice if the search field supported a syntax similar to that of the system-wide Spotlight tool:
   • composer:Ravel
   • artist:Dolphy
   • youget:thepicture

   Showing the Search Bar when a field-filtered query is input wouldn’t make much sense, although I suppose the query could be automatically transformed if the user clicked on a filter.

9. I mocked up an iPhoto-inspired bezel controller for iTunes over a year ago. Since that time, QuickTime 7 has been released with such a controller, but the iTunes team seems not to have gotten the memo. Having to leave and then re-enter the fullscreen visualization mode to browse the active playlist is disruptive.
10. The contextual menu command should read “Copy Song (or Video) Info” - the simple “Copy” is ambiguous. Some people would logically assume that the command copies the audio or video content.
11. The Artwork image well in the multi-item info window should also present a Paste command in a contextual menu.

In my continuing search for a movie organizer, I took a look at Waterfall Software’s iVideo 3.

Comments based on version 3.0.1.

Cool Stuff

1. Clean default interface — not too many buttons and good functional grouping.
2. Visually attractive yet unobtrusive playback controls.
3. Bonjour sharing! Given the similarity to the feature in iTunes, I imagine this feature could be quite popular in college dorms.

First Launch

1. Since iVideo can track movie files that are moved, it might be better to transparently use aliases by default while giving advanced users the option of moving or copying movie files through the Library preference pane. How the movie files are referenced by iVideo is an implementation detail that many users are not likely to be interested in changing. As long as their movies play, they don’t care.
2. Ask the user if they would like iVideo to search for and import movies it discovers. Starting at ~/Movies/ would probably be reasonable. Populating the Library with the user’s movies would immerse them in the application right away rather than first having to either discover the movie scanning feature on their own or manually add their movies.
3. Use [Cancel] …space… [Go Back] [Continue] button ordering to allow users to revisit earlier screens.
4. If you keep the movie file storage/reference method selector on the 2nd screen: “Move the original movie files as needed” - be explicit.
5. While the application is unregistered, it would be nice if the drive scanner allowed the user to choose which 10 of the located movies to add to their library.

General Suggestions

1. Consider dropping the pinstripes for the unified look found in Mail and NetNewsWire 2.0. This apparently requires more custom coding, but it does make for a more visually pleasant interface. The mockup I did for MovieGallery illustrates how this could work for iVideo.
2. Placing the view switching controls in the header of the main pane would mean one less button on the toolbar and a more logical placement. This would also make room to expose the sorting options via a pop-up menu in the Thumbnail and Gallery views. The List view has columns which obviate the need for such a menu.
   • Thumbnail view
   • List view
   • Gallery view
3. The Keywords pane should be obvious; a split design would work. The “i” button should not do three different things!
4. For ratings below 5 stars in Gallery view, the empty star spots should be filled with bullets to keep the alignment stable. The stars sliding to the left to accommodate a bullet when selected is a bit irritating.
5. If a single movie and a folder containing several movies are dropped on the Dock icon, they should all be imported.
6. As with the Movie menu, the contextual menu for movies in playback mode should include the “Set Preview to Current Frame” command at the bottom.
7. When adding a movie to a playlist via drag-and-drop, the Add cursor should be displayed.
8. Include the number of selected movies in the status line at the bottom of the window.

Menu Organization

The menu items are generally well labeled, but the organization needs work. I created an Interface Builder nib of my suggested menu structure which is much easier to understand than the textual descriptions that follow.

File (Playlist)

1. Consider moving the movie-specific commands to the Movie menu and re-titling the File menu Playlist.
2. Group related commands; playlist creation and movie additions.
3. According to decades of Macintosh convention and the Human Interface Guidelines, the File menu should always contain a Close command. This is wrong. The Close command belongs where you (and OmniWeb 5) have it: with the other window manipulation commands in the Window menu. In the File menu, the noun-verb relationship is wrong; the command applies to windows, not files. Rant over.

View

1. Provide keyboard shortcuts for the view modes; T for Thumbnails, G for Gallery, L for List. Command-L is currently assigned to the Loop command, but that could be changed to Shift-Command-L. I would think the view switching commands would be more frequently used than the Loop command, so the benefits outweigh the disruption of the change.
2. The Toggle Information item should be dynamically titled; “Show Information” when the pane is hidden, “Hide Information” when it is shown.
3. In the Arrange Movies sub-menu, make Randomly an item separate from the ordered arrangement methods.
4. The Set Preview to Picture (or Frame) command affects how user’s see the window’s content, so it can go in the View menu.

Movie

1. Group related commands; playback settings at the top and movie file actions at the bottom.
2. Use Command-Delete rather than simply Delete to lower the likelihood of accidentally moving a movie to the Trash. Adding the modifier key would probably make it safe to remove the “Are you sure you want to empty the Trash?” dialog. By using a two-key keyboard command, you can reasonably assume that movies were intentionally moved to the Trash. Undo and Redo should also be supported for the Move to Trash command.
3. The Move to Trash command should display the keyboard shortcut symbols.
4. Add an Export Movies command with Command-E as the shortcut. This removes the currently modal Export command found in the File menu.
5. If technically possible, playback speed and playback direction should be separated.
6. Again, if possible, allow Option to modify the Open With command to Always Open With. Some movies may play more smoothly in applications other than the default player. Having to manually select an alternate player every time is tedious.
7. Change the Loop shortcut to Shift-Command-L to make Command-L available as a shortcut for List view.
8. Place the Move to Trash command here rather than in the File (or Playlist, as I suggest) as it applies only to movies; playlists cannot be moved to the Trash.

Preferences

1. It’s not specifically recommended by the HIG, but enabling Escape to close the Preferences window (used in Mail and QuickTime Player, among others) would be handy.
2. Assign Command-[ and Command-] to move through the panes. This improves keyboard accessibility (implemented in iTunes).

Playback

• A Remember Playback Position preference would be useful. This would allow users to return to the last displayed frame between viewings. Along with this preference, you could set the thumbnail to the last displayed frame.

Sharing

• “Look for shared movies” - you might as well use the same wording as iTunes and iPhoto.

Waterfall is a good Weather Report song. Just thought I’d tell you.