Home → Suggestions →

QuickTime Enabler enhancements

• Edit

mclcmm

16 Dec, 2012 11:18 PM

I understand that with all the work required by the next few versions of TFF this might not be the best time to suggest enhancements to QTE, but I would like to share a few ideas and hear your opinion about them:

• With plugins disabled webpages show an empty box instead of videos. Having a placeholder with a preview image would be much more user friendly and less confusing.

• TenFourFox already supports WebM and, if I understand correctly, in the future it will support H264. If a placeholder will be implemented, QTE user interface should let the user choose between HTML5 and QuickTime Player playback.

• It should be possible to copy a video file URL to the clipboard. In this way it would be easy to open a video using a different player than QuickTime. While QT is versatile and installed on every Mac, applications like VLC, MPlayer and CorePlayer are more CPU efficient.

• Support for embedded videos would be extremely useful.

ViewTube is a GreaseMonkey script that implements most of these features, and that already works fine on TFF.
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011
I wonder if it could be possible to use it as a base for future releases of QuickTime Enabler. While ViewTube relies on plugins, QTE would of course have to open videos in QuickTime Player. Another advantage is that ViewTube works on a good number of sites, some of them not currently supported by QTE (Vimeo, for example).

I would also like to ask if it could be possible to use code from the ClickToPlugin Safari extension to support more sites (for example the BBC) and to get support for embedded videos (something ClickToPlugin really excels at). Link to CTP:
http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/

Thanks for your help and your patience.

1. Support Staff 1 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 17 Dec, 2012 06:15 AM

   

   In order:

   • That's a good suggestion. It shouldn't be too hard to implement, but I need to think of where I can hook in. However, the "plugins disabled" box does show many places.

   • GStreamer or a internal QT decoder stub is being considered, but it's a long way off. IonMonkey has highest priority for new work because based on previous history we observed with tracejit, not being current with the JIT under development will eventually be a port-killer.

   • This seems simple enough to implement, though I may do it "indirectly" (such as redirecting the browser there or some such where you can copy the URL) depending on what facilities for the Clipboard are available from JavaScript or CTypes.

   • Embedded videos do work, at least for YouTube, but they have to embed it "properly" (if they only embed the Flash, it won't work). If they put in the entire HTML sequence, even if it just looks like a black box you can still right-click on it for QTE options.

   • ViewTube relies on the browser to do the data transfer to and from the player, which allows things like Vimeo which need browser cookies to work, but this is only possible with plugins. In our case, QuickTime Player is doing the downloading for us, which is the trick that makes the QTE possible, but it doesn't have access to browser state. It is non-trivial, and may be presently impossible, to plug a downloader extension into the stream QuickTime Player accesses; you'd need to download the video in its entirety first. Long and short is, ViewTube doesn't really buy us anything.

   • ClickToPlugin runs in a very different environment than Gecko, so other than general concepts there isn't much that can be used on this end. Moreover, there won't be plugins at all in 19+ because the Carbon and QuickDraw API code is gone, and adding it back is not only not feasible, but actually doesn't work due to other changes in the browser. So it doesn't add much help here either.

   • Edit

2. 2 Posted by mclcmm on 17 Dec, 2012 06:10 PM

   

   Thanks for your help!
   One last thing, if I may. There is no reference to QTE on TenFourFox main page. While being an add-on and not, strictly speaking, a browser feature, QTE has been specifically created for TFF and extends its capabilities quite dramatically. In other words I would suggest giving QTE more visibility.

   Oh, and if you ever add an icon to QTE, please promise it will be something absolutely horrible! :-)
   You got one-upped by TenFourBird in that respect.
   Maybe it's time for a contest between TFF/QTE users to create something adequate?

   • Edit

3. Support Staff 3 Posted by Cameron Kaiser on 18 Dec, 2012 05:43 AM

   

   It's part of the "Welcome to TenFourFox" page that users get on every update or when installing the browser for the first time. I think that's a logical place for it to go, given that they can't really do anything with it outside of the browser anyway.

   Horrible icons? Fire away!

   • Edit