Slow motion / speeding up with Quicktime Pro

Usually if you want to slow mo or speed up a clip you need a full editor eg Final Cut. Thats expensive for an occasional requirement.

There is a way to do this usng only Quicktime Pro.

Say your movie lasts 30 seconds, but you want to stretch it to 1 minute.

1 - create a new empty movie from file>new player

2 - in your source, select all and the select copy

3 - swith to the new player and paste, and then paste again

this gives you a 1 minute movie, but everything doubled.

4 - in the new player do apple-j, click on the video track, and press delete

5 - switch back to the source and copy again

6 - switch back to the new player and this time from the edit menu select "add to selection & scale"

This causes your pasted movie to be stretch (scaled) to the length of the new player, which we made double.

Apple Mac OSX and the QuickTime MPEG-2 addon

Like many people I've bought the QuickTime MPEG-2 addon. But when I installed it on my new Mac Mini (which replaces the old Mac), although it seems to install OK, when you try to open an MPEG2 file in quicktime or the very excellent MPEG StreamClip, its obvious that the plug-in hasn't taken.

The answer turned out to be to return to the Apple Store and re-download the installer.

Would've been nice if Apple has notified me that a new version is available!

Apple Mac OSX, Elgato EyeTV and Quicktime Streaming Server

Now that I've got the new Mac Mini, an Elgato Diversity seemed a good addition. The v2.x EyeTV software has a 'WiFi' feature, which is actually the software doing a simultaneous transcode to MPEG4 in .mov format. You can then go to a web page and access your recordings. Its intended for wireless iPods such as the iPod Touch.

The problem is that it doesn't stream. I have a partial solution, which is to use the free Apple Darwin Quicktime Streaming Server, which you can get from Apple. Install it and configure, and then you can stream.

If you want to get to your streams you'll need to do a couple of things:

1 - Open you firewall to TCP and UDP on 554 in order that RTSP works from the Internet

2 - You need to export from EyeTV as either .mp4 or .3gp.

Make sure you select 'options' and on the 'streaming' tab click the box to enable streaming. The h.264 option gives you better quality at lower bit rate. The documentation suggests you can make a .mov stream, but I was unable to make this work

If you know what your broadband's upstream capacity is, make sure you stay below it. Anything below about 400 kbps should be safe.

What I need to do next is to find a way to auto-generate a web page to link to the stream files.

Saving Quicktime Streamed Movies

When you view a streamed quicktime movie, you get a .qtch file, which with current version of quicktime (v7.4) you cannot open.

What you can do is find the base URL, and use eg wget to download the .m4v or the .mov.

When the movie is open press apple-I.

It shows a window with source data. Note the url. Using wget fetch the movie

$ wget path.to.movie.com/x/y/z/movie.m4v.

OSX does not have wget by default, so follow these instructions to get it.