If the first time was good, the second time should be better! Right? Well when it comes to the Beta 2 release of the DivX Player for Macintosh, that’s exactly what you get! An even better player than we playered before! Um, er, well, you get the point!
With a slew of bug fixes, additions and refinements this new release is marching headlong towards being what we believe will be coolest movie player for the Mac! Ever! No kidding!
Our Thanks to YOU!
We first want to give a huge shout out to all of you who installed Beta 1 of the player
and provided us with your invaluable feedback and bug reports.
We’ve gone through each and every response making sure to work them in as best we can. For Beta 2, we incorporated many of your suggestions and addressed as many of the bugs you found.
There’s still room for improvement though so keep the feedback coming!
Improvements
Ok, so there are really too many areas we’ve touched on to list them all, but let’s hit some of the highlights found in Beta 2.
- The decode-only DivX codec provided with Beta 2 is now a full Universal Binary! Whoo-hoo! No worries about which type of chip you have in your Mac – just install the DivX Player, crank up your favorite vids and enjoy away! The player will crank through your clips with a sheer lust for video!
- You can now drag-n-drop your movies onto the player icon. Dunno how we missed this most basic feature in Beta 1 -- could be we were all mesmerized by the Desktop Dimmer, but we quickly snapped out of it and added this important capability.
- You can now opt to dim the player window along with the Desktop Dimmer – adds to the cinematic feel of things, doncha think?. We’re even looking into dimming the menu bar and/or the Dock as well. Maybe something to look forward to in the next release? Eh? Nudge, nudge? Wink, wink? Knowhatimean?
- One word: Improved Keyboard Control. Um… anyway, lots and lots of ya wanted more control over playback via the keyboard. So we’re giving it to ya! One guy even stressed the importance that the keys be entirely accessible with one hand! Not sure what he might be doing with the other one… guess using the mouse, eh?
Anyway, since we don’t yet have a user’s guide for the player, I’ll layout the keys we added.
One note, I just realized this morning that we (ok, it’s my own fault!) utilized keys of the number pad, which doesn’t do much for many of you PowerBook owners. So before reminding us (ok, me again!) that we haven’t totally provided what you need, rest assured we’ll add keys for all you non-number-pad-having-people out there…. Anyway:
Main keyboard:
ESC - toggle between full-screen and windowed playback
Number keypad:
7 - Skip backward by a large amount
4 - Skip backward by a medium amount
1 - Skip backward by a small amount
9 - Skip forward by a large amount
6 - Skip forward by a medium amount
3 - Skip forward by a small amount
8 - Fast playback while held down
5 - Pause playback while held down
2 - Slow playback while held down
0 - Play/Pause current movie
If the shift key is held down in addition with the above number controls keys the amount of skipping or rate of playback is multiplied by a factor of 10.
- Lastly, there are tons of little improvements we’ve made, such as:
- The cursor now hides during full screen playback
- Currently open movies are selectable from the player’s contextual menu
- You can't place the player window under the menu bar (try it!)
- Dragging a movie onto the player auto starts it
- The scrubber/playhead/indicator now properly is updated at all times
- The Screen Saver will not kick in during movie playback
- You can now adjust the volume and dimmer when no movie is open
- The player prints winning lottery tickets (just seeing if you’re paying attention!)
- The player window unfades when the movie finishes playing
- If you close the player window you can re-open it from the File Menu
- And lots and lots of littler stuff that don’t bear mentioning...
Cool Features
If you never did get a chance to download Beta 1, be sure to at least visit
its announcement as it covers all the really cool features that we’ve innovated in the DivX Player for Mac. Seriously, it’s worth the quick read.
Download
Oh, still here? I tend to ramble on forever. Even my own Mom tunes me out. What? Oh, was I saying something? I think I even got bored of myself. Surely means to get on with it.
So, take Beta 2 of the DivX Player for Macintosh out and try it out for yourself. The player requires Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later.
Feedback!
Please, please don’t forget to give us your continued suggestions and bug reports – they’ve proven invaluable so far and will surely prove so again. To make it easy, there are menu items right-in-the-player-itself under the “Extras” menu to allow you to share your wisdom with us. Sure makes it easy, eh?
