Mac enabled

I am up and running on my brand new iMac, after migrating from an old Windows XP machine. It’s taken a few days to get everything organised, files transferred, and various settings and things set up. I’ve transferred my Photoshop actions and styles, for example. iTunes took a bit of fiddling, but now seems to be okay. I’ve downloaded and installed a bunch of utilities like TextWrangler (a featureful text editor), FileZilla (FTP client), Inkscape (SVG editor), VLC (video player), and few other knick knacks.

I’ve now just set up a Time Capsule for backups and it’s making the first backup of the system and is working as my new WiFi router. Everything seems to be working nicely, without too much hassle.

The only thing I still need to confirm I can do with the new machine is make a new Darths & Droids strip from scratch. I used VirtualDubMod on Windows to play the ripped movie files, and it has single frame step forwards and backwards, which makes it easy to find the frames I want to screengrab for the comic panels. Unfortunately, VLC only does frame-by-frame stepping forwards, not backwards. (Google finds many people complaining about this fact and requesting step backwards as a feature, invariably followed by people saying the VLC developers refuse point-blank to implement it for some vague reasons.) I found someone recommending Avidemux as an alternative, which has frame-by-frame in both directions. So I installed that, but it crashes on starting.

Then I found someone had written a LUA script for VLC, which seems to do what I want from the comments. But I have no idea what a LUA script is or how to integrate it into VLC.

So I’m kind of stuck now. I really, really need a video player that will let me step frame-by-frame both forwards and backwards. Throwing this out there in case anyone has a solution.

EDIT: I found a guide to installing LUA scripts for VLC, and followed that. But it doesn’t seem to be working. I don’t see an extra step back function anywhere.

3 Responses to “Mac enabled”

  1. Chris Robertson says:

    It appears that Quicktime might work:

    http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050529184528518

    Else, there is a port of MPlayer for Mac OSX:

    http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/

    I don’t have an OSX machine to test on, so this is all second hand.

  2. Hmmm. Quicktime won’t open the video files I have. I may be able to convert them, I guess.

    MPlayer I’ve installed and got working. It only has forward stepping like VLC, no backwards frame-by-frame!

    I thought this would be trivial… Macs have a reputation as being better than Windows for multimedia stuff.

  3. RubiconMike says:

    “I thought this would be trivial… Macs have a reputation as being better than Windows for multimedia stuff.”

    The hype collides with reality – reality wins!

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