InqScribe & OSX Lion: It works!

We have done some testing of InqScribe in Apple’s newly released OS 10.7 “Lion,” and we’re continuing to do more. The good news is that everything seems to work fine in Lion, with one easy-to-address caveat. Here is our partial report:

InqScribe launches in Lion and will perform the basics — video playback, time code insertion, even foot pedal controls all work fine. Transcript windows scroll nicely with Lion’s new multitouch and scrollbar. InqScribe also works with Lion’s “saved state” feature, meaning that the windows you were working on during your last session will automatically open next time you launch it.

InqScribe does not yet work with Lion’s “versions” and “autosave” features; we’re working on that.

There is one important caveat: Lion (and Snow Leopard) users still need QuickTime 7.6.6.

Though it is not required, we recommend that all InqScribe users install QuickTime 7, since it supports many features that are not supported by the more recent QuickTime X (in Mac OS 10.6 and higher) and Windows Media Player (in Windows). QuickTime is available as a free download from Apple.

There are several versions of QuickTime 7 available, depending on your OS version.

• If you have Mac OSX 10.6 or 10.7 (Snow Leopard or Lion), download QuickTime 7.6.6
• If you have Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard), download QuickTime 7.6.9
• If you use Windows, you can continue to download the latest Windows version of QuickTime

Notes:

• Depending on how you open your movie files, they may launch by default in QuickTime X. So if you’re doing things like subtitling, make sure to open your subtitled movies in QuickTime 7.6.6.
• In Lion, QuickTime 7 installs to your Applications > Utilities folder rather than the “Applications” folder.

A simple fix to a common error: Resolving the Windows “MediaProxy” bug

There was a known bug in InqScribe version 2.0.5 (and earlier) that caused problems with Windows Media Player. The crash report mentions things like “WMP_Provider” and “MediaProxy”.

This has been fixed in InqScribe version 2.1. Simply upgrade to the latest version of InqScribe and your problem will be solved. The upgrade is free; you can download it here: http://www.inqscribe.com/download.html

You can read more about this issue in our knowledge base.

Perian gives InqScribe for Mac access to Flash & more

Perian 1.2 is out, and highly recommended for users of InqScribe on MacOS.  A free, open-source QuickTime component, Perian gives QuickTime– and thus InqScribe– access to many popular media formats, including Flash video (.flv), DivX, 3ivx, and many others.  Alas, there is no comparable tool for Windows.

Dive into Video

If you’re at all interested in where video and audio for the web is going, this chapter by Mark Pilgrim is required reading. Mark does a great job providing background on the core cross-platform codecs that are in use today (with the cross-platform bit ruling out WMV) and talks about how HTML5 will offer native support for video playback.

His focus is primarily on h.264 and Ogg video, since offering video in those two formats will cover all modern browsers. He also describes methods and tools you can use to encode your videos in those formats (including Firefogg, which was new to me, and FFMPEG2Theora for Ogg, and Handbrake for h.264).

InqScribe and LTC

We’ve added a knowledge base entry discussing the challenges inherent in decoding linear timecode (LTC). In short: InqScribe can’t do it, we’d like to support it, but it’s really hard to do the analog-to-digital conversion. We’ll track alternative solutions on the KB page as we find them.