I’m sure I’ll want to refine and update it later, but right now I felt the need to jot this down. I won’t get into ripping, transcoding or conversion, this is all about playback.

Based on the news that the VLC team has had roadblocks from Apple I have only one thing to say: Apple is a corporation that has to abide by contracts and that means DRM (Digital Rights Management). VLC can ignore or remove some DRM restrictions, especially with DVDs, hence it’s usefulness. To expect Apple to openly support a product that might violate any of the undisclosed contractual obligations they must have with big media corporations is silly. Love it or hate it, that is our system. Plus, the market is still reeling from the boom in digital content delivery and it’s a mess.

Next, Apple’s long-in-the-tooth Quicktime API is finally getting a rebuild starting with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you asked me I would tell you that it’s going to be transitional for a while, but this is probably a good thing given the long life that Quicktime has had with an older “Classic” Mac OS code base. That means Quicktime APIs are a moving target. That is possibly one reason Apple hasn’t published a lot of info or willingly assisted an open source project like VLC. There has to be a lot more work to do before that can happen.

I like and use VLC from time-to-time. If anything I’d congratulate the team for getting this far while dealing with so many confusing formats and APIs. It’s a little engine that could, GUI for Mac OS X aside. I hope the news of their current predicament helps rustle up more support.

In the meantime what can an OS X user who aquires a MKV (Matroska Multimedia Container), M2TS or any other video container do? As of this writing it comes down to these tools:

VLC – Well duh. Been a standby for a long time. Worth having around for more than one reason. Much buggier than the other players I’m about to mention, but still a worthy app.

Perian – the only one of it’s kind, a Quicktime Plug-in that adds support for MKV, DivX and a slew of other confusing and convoluted formats. Load it and Quicktime Player 7.x is your bitch for the most part. Note: I don’t have an Intel Mac, so I can’t comment on the Snow Leopard compatibility with Quicktime X and Perian, if any. This is the easiest way to start playing a whole boatload of non-Apple native codecs. Includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough if you have the hardware for that.

Movist – nice slick player that is in a league of it’s own. Runs great and plays everything I’ve thrown at it.

MPlayer OSX Extended – a cleaned up MPlayer derivative that works better than VLC (for me). Some 1080p clips might need some tweaking of the “frameskip” pref, but otherwise this is a easy to use way to play most everything. Also includes 5.1 surround sound or DTS passthrough.

Plex – A media center/player that is Intel and OS X 10.5 Leopard only. It’s designed for keyboard or Apple Remote control and is essentially Front Row on steroids. Slick.

Miro – A media center/player for PPC and Intel Macs that ties into torrent networks. More features and complexity than some might want. Offers lots of subscriptions that foreshadow what TV is going to look like in a few more years.

If you’re struggling with playback on OS X these are the better tools to try.

First, from what I can see this wasn’t being demanded from users and developers, however all software benefits from some cleanup and optimization. Of course new features drive sales which is why you never hear an operating system sold this way. So Apple is breaking a few rules doing this. The price is as yet unannounced and we’re all hoping it’s half the cost of a full OS X update (or even free, which is doubtful).

Even though Snow Leopard is not about new features it actually has some core functions that basically are new features to me – notably Quicktime X, OpenCL, full native Exchange support and lots of improvements to core OS services like multi-core management. There aren’t a lot of details but I suspect after this weeks WWDC is wrapped more will be divulged.

Quicktime X is hopefully a long overdue re-write to what is essentially still a ported Carbon codebase. Honesty I cannot imagine what my work would be like without Quicktime – it’s been a powerful technology that has been overlooked over the years. I especially love old comparisons of Windows Media Player to Quicktime Player that never once even recognize that Quicktime is a set of APIs and the player is not what it’s all about. WMP plays stuff, but you could record and edit a feature with special effects in Quicktime if you knew how. Before OS X, Quicktime languished for a while until the iPod/iTunes boom, but even then the radical new features that Quicktime 3.x had at the time still seem great when compared to subsequent updates. Apple has brought Quicktime into it’s current 7.x incarnation pretty well despite the aging foundation it has, but there is more room to grow here.

Mostly I applaud an honest acknowledgement that the next revision is all about polishing and optimization. This will pay off in the long term and Apple seems to know it. It will also give developers a bit more time with the Leopard chapter which is good since many of the new features in Leopard are under the hood and not so evident to a user.

Update:

Gruber over at Daring Fireball seems to agree on the “no new features” not being entirely accurate.

With the recent news of Fallout 3 arriving I dug out my Fallout 1 and 2 discs to relive the dirt and glory once more. A bit of the way into Fallout 2 I somehow lost a key inventory item and couldn’t seem to get it back, so a little help was needed.

I remembered the Fallout 2 Survival Kit, aka F.2.S.K., a nice little OS X app for editing saved games. So hit the net to see if I could still get it. Alas, it was listed at version 1.4 at Versiontracker but with dead links to both the app itself and the developers site – so I reported the links as dead to Versiontracker.

Being the digital packrat that I am, I dug through some CD-R archives and found that I did still have the F.2.S.K 1.3.1 version from some years ago. I even had a similar app for OS 9/Classic called the Fallout Character Editor 1.0a2 (only Fallout 1 was ever released for pre-OS X Macs).

I also discovered that the same 1.3.1 version was still hosted online in at least two other places, albeit under a typo (“survuval” instead of “survival”, which doesn’t help searches). It appears that a good number of folks are looking for it still, so I’m hosting the 1.3.1 version renamed nicely for search engines here:

Fallout 2 Survival Kit + Garden of Eden Creation Kit for Mac OS X.

The software was developed by Michael Edgar at Scotiasoft Systems (which is apparently dead and gone).

I also shot off an email to the developer’s address in the read me, which so far hasn’t bounced. If I can get a reply I’ll post the results here.

April 5, 2008 Update:

I’ve located the last known version of this utility sitting on my old Powerbook. You can now download it here:

The Fallout 2 Survival Kit 1.4

PS – Versiontracker still lists the dead link for this despite my reporting it. It would seem that that feature is worthless.

While you’re playing check out the Unofficial Fallout 2 Patch (Mac & Windows + a manual install for geeks). I’ve yet to try it but it may fix what caused my need for the cheat.

October 4 2008 Update:

Just so there is some mention of this glitch somewhere, I discovered that neither Fallout 1 or 2 would launch without crashing when run from within a directory that had an “•” in the file name. I’d bet that any other special characters would also trigger this. So keep Fallout loose in your Apps folder kids.