How to Operate QuickTime Player on Your MacBook
QuickTime makes a world of movies, audio, graphics, and music instantly available to you. When you open a QuickTime file, QuickTime Player creates a new window to display it. All QuickTime Player windows share some common features:
Close, Minimize, and Zoom controls: These three controls appear at the top-left corner of most windows in Mac OS X. You probably recognize them by their colors: red, yellow, and green, respectively.
Resize handle: Drag any corner or side of the QuickTime Player to resize its movie for playback. Hold Shift while dragging to break free from constrained resizing. If the document contains only sound media, the window grows or shrinks in a horizontal direction when you resize it.
Any resizing that you perform makes no changes to the original file. QuickTime provides it for your convenience during playback.
Although some window features are common to all QuickTime Player windows, many features depend on the type of media that you wish to play.
| Window Feature | Media Type That Uses This Feature |
|---|---|
| Play button | All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI |
| Rewind button | All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI |
| Fast Forward | All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI |
| Timeline | All time-based media: movies, audio, animations, and MIDI |
| Volume slider | All media with one or more audio tracks |
| Toggle Full Screen | All movies and animations |
| Zoom buttons | QTVR 3-D media |
| Rotate buttons | QTVR 3-D media |
| Mute | All media with one or more audio tracks |
To make your life easier, QuickTime does a lot of work for you behind the scenes each time that it opens a media file. Although you might think that there are different combinations of controls in QuickTime Player, the reality is that the various media windows are more similar than they are different.
