[Tabular-Iceberg]

I'm absolutely not viewing the past through rose colored glasses. RealPlayer was a dumpster fire, but that came later.

I could hold shift and drag on the timeline to select, copy, then paste it into a document or another video. I can't do that with VLC today. Apple removed the feature in later releases too.

[mmh0000]

What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.

Today with modern tools like VLC or MPV and ffmpeg nearly anything can be viewed, streamed, or locally saved by your average user with basic Google search skills.

And the number of free and paid video editing tools as far beyond what we ever had in the past.

Then there’s the vast improvement in codecs. It’s quite insane that we can have a feature length - 4k video with 8 channel audio in a 3GiB file.

The only problem about the modern world is streaming companies who purposely degrade the experience for money. And the solution is simply to fly the pirate flag high.

[kccqzy]

One issue GP may be referring to is the bifurcation of video viewing tools and video editing tools. There are excellent video editing tools: on the desktop from paid ones like Premiere to free (as in beer) ones like DaVinci Resolve, not to mention mobile apps behind the TikTok culture. There are also excellent and built-in video players in every browser and every OS.

But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos, even though cut, copy, and paste are basic OS-level features. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents. Or if you aren’t fancy you use notepad to view and edit your plain text documents. These text documents easily allow cut, copy, and paste.

[embedding-shape]

I think that happens when the rift between producers and consumers require some learning to jump from one to the other, at least professionally.

Some of the people who produce videos for a living require vastly different tools than someone who needs to trim the edges of a short home video clip, so the the UI and UX has to be different, otherwise these people won't be able to effectively do their job.

For writing, everyone pretty much does it the same way. You sit down, you enter characters with a keyboard, and sometimes to remove/edit stuff. Of course, there are professional tools for people who write stories for a living, that helps you keep track of arcs, characters, environments and so on, and many professionals do use them.

So while it looks like "Ah, Word actually works for everyone, why can't we do the same for video?" there are still professionals who need tools specifically for "writing stories" or "writing screenplays", and same in other areas :)

[Tabular-Iceberg]

I used Avid VideoShop back in the day for that, which was Avid's consumer level offering. But I still appreciated being able to copy and paste from Movie Player when I just needed to paste a clip into a different application, which was much quicker when that was all I needed.

[cycomanic]

> But in the modern age viewing and editing a video are seen as two entirely separate tasks. You simply do not expect the video player that comes with the OS to cut, copy, and paste videos. This is very much different from the experience of almost all other kinds of files. You use Microsoft word to view and edit your word processing documents.

I think Word and other text documents are the exception not the rule. Image files have been pretty much always been viewed in different programs than the ones used for editing (although some viewers have rudimentary crop or rotate capabilities). Same with PDFs or PS files we alway view in something different than the editor. Nobody listen to audio files in e.g. Audacity.

In fact I can't even think about any other format except for docs where the editor is also the prime viewer (I suspect the reason is that originally consumption of docs was printing)

[CharlesW]

> What you’re describing with QuickTime was a proprietary nightmare that didn’t even work correctly across Apple products, let alone Microsoft or Linux.

This is such a deep misunderstanding of QuickTime that it's hard to know where to begin. QuickTime supported standards whenever possible, but you must know that QuickTime pioneered digital video and audio before open media standards were ubiquitous, and was in fact the blueprint (sometimes literally, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_base_media_file_format) for today's standards. As a top-level history lesson, do yourself a favor and ask your favorite LLM, "What technology standards did QuickTime use and inspire?"

[mmh0000]

You may be "technically correct" (the best kind of correct), but holy je-BUS was QT NOT user-friendly nor cross-platform-friendly at the height of its popularity.

There's a reason that once alternatives became available, users left QT as quickly as they could.

QT was pioneering A/V solutions; I won't argue against that. So was Flash, so was Shockwave, so was RealMedia, and remember the horror that was Windows Media Player (from the Win98 era)?

[ConceptJunkie]

Modern video tools provide an enormous selection, much of which is free.

But I'll always miss VirtualDub.

[embedding-shape]

> But I'll always miss VirtualDub.

Miss? I still used it just last week! Still haven't found anything that is as fast and easy to take a directory of frames in .png and concatenating them together into a proper video. I use it post 3D renders all the time :)

[paradox460]

ffmpeg?

[embedding-shape]

Not sure you missed it, I did say "easy" :) Last time I compared them, VirtualDub was still the fastest.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

But I don't want more tools. I want to be able to view a video on YouTube, shift-scrub to select a short clip, hit copy, then go over to X, write some commentary, and hit paste. I don't want to have to go through yt-dlp, a dedicated video editor, and a file picker.

This functionality was taken for granted when video on personal computers were first invented.

[j1elo]

You're not viewing the past with rose colored glasses. You're just viewing the past. We had simpler codecs with simpler computational complexities. Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames. Nowadays, we have forward- and backward- dependant frames, scene detection, and lots of other very advanced compression techniques.

There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode [1] and after years the results are mixed and only working for very specific codecs; no wonder Apple decided that doing the same, to their quality standards of the time, was not worth the effort or a secondary feature that was not in scope.

[1]: https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

[CharlesW]

> Holding Shift and selecting a chunk of a video to copy was simple because videos were mostly a succession of independently compressed frames.

That was never true. QuickTime 1.0 famously included the Apple Video ("Road Pizza") codec, which had to do temporal compression in order to support video delivery at usable file sizes.

> There are whole projects striving to provide a reliable way to just cut videos without having to recode…

Again, even QuickTime 1.0 did this perfectly.

[kalleboo]

It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.

Early QuickTime was a miracle playing video on 25 MHz Motorola CPUs.

[darkwater]

> It's crazy how even today, VLC still can't scrub in an h264 video and even skipping around takes seconds for it to catch up while QuickTime Player (AVFoundation) can scrub around in realtime.

I'm completely ignorant on this topic but couldn't this be related to patents?

[morshu9001]

QT is so much faster than anything else. I'll only use VLC if the format is weird or if I want some feature like playlists.

[Tabular-Iceberg]

Cinepak was one such codec and that could be arbitrarily seeked and copied just fine, even in the early 90s, if the player was competently implemented. It's just a matter of computing from the nearest keyframe.

What really happened was that the feature was first paywalled as QuickTime Pro, then removed altogether, in typical enshittification fashion. It had nothing to do with the technical limitations of any of the codecs.

[dspillett]

> RealPlayer was a dumpster fire

And actually malware IMO. IIRC many of its installs were through tricks: silent installations with other software, drive-by downloads, etc. And once in, by fair means or fowl, it took over every video playing avenue whether you wanted it to or not, and it itself included other malware like Comet Cursor.