Steve Jobs: You Need To Allow The QuickTime Plugin To Support Fullscreen Video

For as far back as I can remember, nearly every video clip on the web has given the viewer the option of deciding if they want to do fullscreen and have the video fill their monitor. This option has been considered the norm in the industry for many, many years, yet for some reason, Apple does not allow videos played back in the browser via the QuickTime plugin to support fullscreen.

When you watch any of the videos on Apple.com that give product demos or visit their popular movie trailer website, there is no option to watch any video in fullscreen unless you first download the video to your hard drive. Why isn't Apple allowing web based videos to go fullscreen? For all the talk Apple keeps doing about "standards", fullscreen playback of videos on the web has been a standard for more than a few years. Maybe not a standard in terms of a programming language like the term is widely used today, but it is a standardized function that's supported by all plugins for video playback, except Apple's.

It's logical to think that Apple was originally doing this simply to force people to pay $29.99 to purchase a QuickTime Pro license, but that only solves the problem for local media. Much of the content on the web can't be downloaded to your hard drive so even if you have a QuickTime Pro license, you still can't make any videos played back in a browser fullscreen. And starting with the QuickTime 7 player, Apple made fullscreen one of the options supported in the free player. So this does not seem to be about pushing people to the pro licenses anymore.

For all the talk Steve Jobs does about the great "experience" you get from Apple products and platforms, that's not the case when it comes to QuickTime videos on the web. Watching videos from the Apple movie trailer page on only a quarter of my 15" screen, when the content is encoded for HD, is not my idea of a great web experience. It's no wonder that content owners don't use the QuickTime plugin for playback of their web based videos. Steve, you need to fix this. We deserve fullscreen video.

Comments

[GG]

Holy words

[Forrest Maready]

I'm not positive, but I think it has something to do with legacy Quicktime development and the "recent" emergence of the iTunes portal. Open Quicktime, and you're presented with a portal style screen of choices. Click a link, which will take you to the web, which will then attempt to open iTunes. Pretty elegant, huh? Not for me, and definitely not by Apple's standards. This tells me there's been some conflicting development and directions within the Quicktime camp at Apple.

DRM and User Experience, two things very important to them, are difficult to manage in the browser. Within the iTunes app, easy. Quicktime, iPhone, iPod and iPad... Easy there. But in the Wild Wild West of browserville, forget it. I'm guessing they are thinking if someone wants to watch Quicktime full-screen, it's for a Movie or TV show, something that doesn't currently happen in browsers (in the Apple pantheon, at least). I would assume the minute they make a transition to the cloud, and iTunes becomes a browser experience (Safari only, of course), they will support fullscreen Quicktime from the browser.

[Steve]

Developers use to be able to open a chromeless fullscreen window in IE and embed the QuickTime Player at the same size as the window, effectively providing a workaround to this issue.

Chromeless windows are now a thing of the past and they all, at a minimum, have a title bar. So while it's not a perfect solution, its the only solution until Apple provides fullscreen capabilities in the plugin.

This is also the reason why I choose to use Flash over QuickTime, as it provides both fullscreen capabilities and has better cross-platform support.

[Dedwarmo]

The only thing I have to add to the discussion is my vote. I used to go to Apple.com to watch movie trailers, but now I watch them on Youtube because on Youtube I can watch them full-screen.

[Thomas]

I completely agree. This functionality should be built into the plugin. It's frustrating that the new Quicktime Player X application has a full screen button built into the menu bar and the plugin does not offer the same option. It really would be helpful to not have to launch the Quicktime player application to view web video in full-screen or have to resort to using Flash players to accomplish this.