Mat on Macs

One of the first problems I ran into was playing downloaded videos on BONAVENTURE. This is really annoying as Divx for Mac 6 (PPC) had just been released a few days before and I was justing getting used to using it to play divx and xvid content in the Quicktime Player. Fortunately, the Divx people are on the ball and have already released a Intel beta. I’ve downloaded it and it seems to be running quite well. It has played most of the files I’ve thrown at it so far, but still chokes on certain xvids. [update: There’s a divide by zero error caused, evidently, by malformed AVI headers. Supposedly it’s already fixed internally, so I assume they’ll kick it out with the next beta. For now, though, my only recourse has been MPlayerOSX (see below)]

Before the Divx release I was using the excellent open source video player VLC, but it just wasn’t cutting it through Rosetta. And from what I could tell from the forums it might be a while before the Intel native binary is released. A few sites list an Intel binary from last year, which I had to google to find, but even when I did I was unable to make it work properly (all the blacks appeared green). [update: Someone suggested to me in an email comment that I should try one of the nightly Intel builds found here. I just tried the Feb 21st nightly build and it’s finally working! Huzzah!]

After assiduous searching I found that an Intel binary of MPlayerOSX (download) had been released that would in fact play the xvid that was acting up. I never really liked MPlayerOSX (which come from the Linux world and looks it). I found the PPC version to be much less capable (and attractive) than VLC, but I’ll take what I can get as long as my content playing. So I would recommend first trying the Divx codec in Quicktime and if that doesn’t work try MPlayerOSX.

[update: sadly the story on Windows Media support isn’t as good. Ironically, Microsoft announced that it was stopping development of the unlamented Windows Media Player for the Mac and instead would be giving away flip4mac’s WMV codec for QT Player at MWSF, but unfortunately they’ve indicated that it’s not yet Intel compatible and there’s no ETA.]

As I mentioned before, my previous computer is a G4Powerbook. I was previously using the mac version of the open source, cross-platform virtual keyboard and mouse sharing software SynergyKM to share my desktop keyboard and mouse with my notebook (in fact I still use Synergy at work where the server is a PC). While there is a universal binary out, I was having some trouble with it so I turned to a Mac only alternative called teleport. As you can see below you arrange the machines’ desktop so that it matches the actual physical layout of your computers. When you move the mouse to the edge of the screen it automatically jumps over–including copying the clipboard. A bezel appears on the server mac indicating that the mouse and keyboard are controlling the other machine. In short, teleport “just works” and is a much more mac-like program.

So now I can control Clare with my preferred Logitech MX 1000 and Macally Icekey and I can have a threeway! Highly recommended.