Getting various things Mac to deal with .oggs

[jbsegal]

So, I've got this Mac. I've also got this livejournal account and occasional denizens of my friends list who use phoneposting. LJ encodes phone posts as .ogg files. That's fine with me.

I've got the Ogg QT component. It works. QT player can play ogg files. However, NOTHING I do will get it to deal happily.

(Note: At the moment, my browser is Firefox. I may well switch to Opera 7.5(t3) soon. Safari does about 85-90% of what I want, but I miss the last 10-15% too much.)

So anyway:
Firefox Problem: I can not make firefox open oggs in QT player. When I go to pick an app to open the file with, QTP is grayed out. I have been unable to find a prefs file to edit to force the choice the gui won't let me have.

OSX Problems: My system has decided that oggs are opened with Amadeus II. This is not what I want. From time to time, I take an ogg file, CMD-I/Get Info it, change the app under 'Open with:' to QTP (after manually selecting 'all apps' rather than 'preferred apps') and then hit the 'Change All...' button to 'Use this application to open all documents like this.'

I don't get a QT icon on any of the files - I get a blank document icon.

I /can/ double-click on any existing oggs to open them in QTP.

I can NOT drag-n-drop them on to QTP's dock icon, app icon or a running player to launch them.

I have a pretty solid guarantee that future downloads of oggs will end up 'owned' by Amadeus II.

Anyone have any clue? Thanks!

Comments

[dr-memory.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my personal hell.

The QT ogg component deals, sometimes, just barely, with ogg files that are on your local disk. It cannot stream oggs. Period. Forget about playing network-remote ogg files with iTunes or QTPlayer.

Firefox for OSX has a bug that prevents the application selector from working properly 99% of the time.

There are two alternate audio player apps, Audion and WHAMB that purport to deal correctly with ogg as a streaming format. Audion generally works, but is payware, has a number of annoying bugs/misfeatures, and hasn't been updated in over a year. WHAMB is very new and crashes a lot.

This is why I keep a windows laptop around just so that I can use WinAmp 2.91 to listen to music.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I don't personally use any .ogg files, so I have no real experience. (All of my music being in AAC format...)

This versiontracker search lists a few options you don't mention, and I've used VLC media player, and it's fairly handy for things that QuickTime chokes on.

versiontracker search result page

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

This hint might also help:

MacOSXHints

[summerrose.livejournal.com]

There's a file which you can hand edit to make FireFox use QT Player or iTunes open the ogg files. I don't have the name right now, since I'm not in OS X right now, but will try to remember to post it next time I reboot into MacOS.