Media Preview

Detailed information of Media Preview

Basic information

QTTabBar displays Preview Window on media files: image, movie, sound, and text.

♪ Music file preview ♫

How to display Preview

There're 3 ways to display Preview Window.
  • Point a media file by mouse cursor
  • Press arrow keys and select a media file
  • Press assigned keyboard shortcut to show preview of selected file in Folder View and Subfolder Menu
Preview Window pops up after interval time that is set in Option Window. Default value is 400 msec.

Preview on Subfolder Menu

Yes, Preview is available not only in Folder View, but on Subfolder Menu.

Previewed Shiba Inu on Subfolder Menu.

Supported file types

Movie and music Everything that Windows Media Player can play.
Album art images are displayed in music preview window if any embedded.
Also supports Play List file such as .m3u, .m3u8, .pls, .wpl files.
Picture Currently supports .bmp, .dib, .rle, .jpg, .jpeg, .jpe, .jfif, .gif, .emf, .wmf, .tif, .tiff, .png, .wdp image files.
Other file types that thumbnails are displayed in Folder View, such as Office files, are also previewed if you add those file extensions to Option Window.
Text Automatically detects encodings of text files. (Sometimes fails, though...)

By default, QTTabBar tries to play these movie and music file extensions :
.3gp, .3g2, .asf, .asx, .au, .avi, .dvr-ms, .fla, .flac, .flv, .m1v, .m3u, .m3u8, .m4a, .m4v, .mid, .midi, .mka, .mkv, .mov, .mp2, .mp3, .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .oga, .ogg, .ogv, .ogx, .pls, .rm, .snd, .spx, .vob, .wav, .webm, .wma, .wmv, .wpl.
But Windows Media Player may not have codecs to play some of these formats. Install them!

Control Preview Window

Preview Window can be controled by keyboard shortcuts. By default, num-pad keys are assigned.
Your keyboard doesn't have num-pad? Assign to other keys in Option Window!

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Back / Forward When playing movie or music file, skips back / forward 10 seconds. (Not all media types allow this operations.)
When displaying text preview, scrolls vertically.
Pause Pause or resume while playing movie or music file.
Slower / Faster Plays 10% slower / faster. (Not all media types allow this operations.)
Reset speed Plays at normal speed.
Shrink / Enlarge Shrink or enlarge Preview Window size when playing movie, music, or image file. (The window will not be enlarged over mouse cursor or source file icon.)
Reset size Reset Preview Window size to default.
Try Full Size Tries to enlarge the window to the size of original source. (The window will not be enlarged over mouse cursor or source file icon.)
This is toggled on and off.
Send to corner Move Preview Window to the corner of screen.
Volume + / - Turn up / down the loudness of movie and music preview.
Full Screen Preview Window goes full screen in the monitor specified in the Option Window.
Full screen can be locked when playing movie or music file by click on button on the window or pressing keyboard shortcut.
Locked window won't vanish and continues playing even if it loses focus. Another Preview Window is available in other screens.
To exit full screen mode, press ESC key or double-click on the window.
Play previous / next track Plays previous / next file in the Folder View.
When playing play-list file, plays previous / next track.
Move full-screen window to the previous / next monitor Works in multi-monitor environment.

Default key map to control Preview window

Known Issues

Video playback freezes

Video preview freezes and won't work anymore until Explorer restarts in some environments. This happens when preview window that is playing H264 videos is moved between Primary monitor and Secondary monitors. Reported occurrences are in PCs that are equipped with Intel HD Graphics.

Workaround

Consider turning off hardware acceleration support in Preview setting in the Options Window.