quicktime player mac pause screen recording

Once you’ve opened a compatible file (which you can do by dragging the media file on top of the QuickTime Player icon in the Dock or by choosing QuickTime Player’s File > Open File command), you’ll see a black window. If you’d like QuickTime to play Windows media files, you can download and install the free Windows Media Components for QuickTime from Microsoft’s website.Īn audio file that’s open in QuickTime Player X. The Windows Media movie format (.wmv) isn’t supported either. Unsupported audio files include Windows Media (they bear a. So instead, I’ll mention a couple of popular media formats used largely in the Windows and Linux worlds that QuickTime doesn’t support. QuickTime supports audio, image, and movie file formats too numerous to list. For the application to actually do something, you need to open a media file that QuickTime can play.

You’ll see the QuickTime Player name appear next to the Apple logo in the Mac’s menu bar, along with QuickTime Player’s menus, but that’s about it. Launch QuickTime Player (which is found in the Applications folder at the root level of your startup drive) and…well, nothing much happens. And that player what we’ll talk about in this lesson. Before iTunes came along, QuickTime Player is how most people watched movies on their Macs. However, when you hear people talking about QuickTime on their Mac, they’re invariably speaking of the QuickTime Player application. When the operating system needs to play media, it looks to this QuickTime layer to do the job. If you think of the Mac OS as a series of blocks, each of which is part of the sturdy wall that is the Macintosh computing experience, QuickTime would be one layer of those blocks.

As I’ve outlined up to this point, QuickTime is a technology rather than an application.

Originally developed in 1991 as a multimedia technology that accompanied the System 6 operating system, QuickTime has been built in to every version of the Mac’s operating system since.īefore we take another step, let’s a peer a little more carefully into what QuickTime is and isn’t. This bit of media magic is performed by something called QuickTime. As a newish Mac user, you may wonder what allows your computer to display pictures and play music and movies.

Quicktime player mac pause screen recording