At long last, Apple will (allegedly) stop charging customers for the "Pro" features of QuickTime by building them into Snow Leopard. Finally.

You'll recall that Apple has been gradually increasing the options available to the free version of QuickTime, like full screen playback mode. Other features of the Pro version -- like simple editing and export options -- were unlocked with in a recent developer's build of Snow Leopard.

Of course, this may be a way to let developers test all aspects of QuickTime, but we're hoping that's not the case. With the popularity of Apple's video editing software like iMovie and Final Cut, it seems that simple cut-and-paste should be free with QuickTime. Launching one of those apps just to complete a simple edit is overkill. Kind of like swatting a fly with a Buick.

We've got our fingers crossed.

They say that necessity is the mother of invention, but personally I'd nominate frustration instead. Lots of the time, the things you need to do, or think you need to do (get more exercise, pay your taxes) get pushed off or procrastinated into irrelevancy, but the things that frustrate you -- even if they're below the radar -- will drive you to the point of saying "I'm going to fix this @!#*& problem no matter what it takes!" Inventions motivated by frustration tend to be quick hacks that provide at least a momentary sense of achievement, if nothing more.

If I wasn't deeply frustrated with the QuickTime Pro feature that lets you quickly email a movie, but only if you use Mail.app as your email client, I wouldn't have spent the time and energy to whomp up this Applescript. Entourage users can throw it into the Entourage script menu, or stash it in a quick-run location or under a hotkey if you want. All it does is export the frontmost movie from QuickTime Player (standard or Pro), then it encloses the exported file in a new Entourage email. Nothing too fancy, minimal error checking, and it will not respect odd/widescreen aspect ratios... but it does seem to work. If you are recording quick video clips with your iSight and emailing them off, or doing mini-screencasts, this may be something that finds a home on your machine. Download it here.

Please note that the script is placed in the public domain, in readable form, and is provided with NO WARRANTY WHATSOEVER. Use at your own risk. Any ill consequences to you, your computer, your videos, your sanity or your interactions with friends & family who are now bombarded with your video snippets are your own problem and in no way the responsibility of me, TUAW, Weblogs, Inc. or AOL. In case of a water landing, your seat cushion serves as a flotation device. Exits are under the lighted signs. Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for it makes them soggy and hard to light.

As should be clear from our many posts about it, QuickTime Pro offers some pretty nice basic editing features for $30. Nonetheless, you might think there is room for another low-end video editing application for the Mac, precisely because QuickTime Pro is so centered around the MOV container and Apple favored codecs like H.264. In a cross-platform world much of the video you might run across, and want to edit, won't be in Apple favored formats. Though QuickTime Pro may be able to handle many of these through separate codec plugins, SimpleMovieX has the advantage of having native support for the common MPEG and AVI formats, which allows you to edit, split, and merge AVI files encoded with DivX. The SimpleMovieX developers have a comparison page that lays out the differences to QuickTime Pro. SimpleMovieX is well worth a look for simple video editing needs, particularly without the need for transcoding.

SimpleMovieX is the same $30 as QuickTime Pro, but unlike the latter a demo is available for download.

Today with so many of us using our digital cameras to shoot short video segments, it's especially easy to forget that we're dealing with videos and turn the camera on its side for a portrait orientation. Unfortunately, most video programs are not set up to handle portrait video. The video ends up displaying on its side. QuickTime Pro makes it easy to recover from this kind of shooting calamity and restore the orientation you intended. Here's a gallery showing you how.

Our own David just texted us to let us know that Apple has added Xvid to its online QuickTime Components list. The Xvid-for-QuickTime component, which you can download here, allows you to play and encode Xvid video. As the writeup mentions, Xvid follows the MPEG-4 standard.

TUAW reader Dave has posted a tutorial at his site on using Quicktime to create video files with 5.1 sound. Taking video files he captured with an Elgato EyeTV, he uses mAC3dec and Quicktime Pro to separate the sound into the six channels of 5.1 sound. It looks pretty straight forward, but I don't have an EyeTV, so I couldn't try it out. Thanks for sharing, Dave!

PS-Did you really hang out with Lewis Black? We're jealous.