I use applescript and quicktime a lot. I’d like this to be a discussion about what has been broken, fixed, or changed in quicktime 7.2 compared to the last 7.1.x version. Hopefully we can come up with a general list to refer to for our applescripting needs. I’ll start… I’ve noticed 2 big changes in 7.2, one broken and one fixed.
- Fixed: there was a problem with presenting movies on various displays in prior versions of 7.x. If you have more that 1 display attached to your computer then you might know what I’m talking about. The following code didn’t previously work, but does now…
tell application "QuickTime Player"
present document 1 display 2 scale screen
end tell
and this code works to present different movies on each display at the same time…
tell application "QuickTime Player"
present document 1 display 1
present document 2 display 2
end tell
- Broken: in 7.2 the “save self contained” and other variations of the “save” command are broken. Here’s the only “save” solution I’ve come up with. Do you know of any others?
I found if I write the file name (i.e. the filename I want the saved file to be called) into the “Full Name” annotation of the movie, then I can use gui scripting for the rest. That’s because if the movie has the full name annotation then when you click the “save as” button using gui scripting, the name that shows up in the save as dialog box is the annotation name… so I just have to click the OK button at that point. There’s 3 major problems with this solution though that don’t address what the “save self contained” could do…
a. you can’t set the path where you want the movie saved. The “save as” dialog defaults to the last location that was used, it can’t be set with applescript, at least not without some more complicated gui scripting.
b. as you know, with gui scripting you can’t touch anything on your computer while the script is running otherwise the gui scripting gets messed up.
c. you can’t use this solution in a loop to process multiple files at once. I noticed if I have another command after the gui scripting code that the rest of the commands will execute before the file has finished saving. For example I normally have something like “close document 1” after the save command, so I can close the front movie and proceed to process the next movie file. I noticed that with the gui scripting the script doesn’t wait for the file to be saved.
set new_file_name to "New File Name"
-- make the annotation for the new file name
tell application "QuickTime Player" to tell document 1
if exists annotation "Full Name" then
set full text of annotation "Full Name" to new_file_name
else
make new annotation with properties {name:"Full Name", full text:new_file_name}
end if
end tell
-- gui script the save
tell application "QuickTime Player" to activate
tell application "System Events" to tell process "QuickTime Player"
click menu item "Save As." of menu 1 of menu bar item "File" of menu bar 1
delay 0.5
click button "Save" of sheet 1 of window 1
end tell
If you’ve seen other things in the 7.2 please post them before I have to figure it out on my own! 