I’ve been transcoding a bunch of video clips recently, to load onto my PSP and inflict on my friends, and ran into a limitation of QuickTime Player that bugs the hell out of me: you can’t jump to a specific time in the video, even in the A/V Controls dialog. You can adjust playback speed, jog/shuttle around, and drag the playhead around, but none of these methods have any actual precision. There’s a perfectly good time counter in the window, but you can’t do anything with it.

Fortunately, it’s a scriptable app, and Apple supplies a library of sample code that includes a “Move to X in Front Movie” in the navigation section. Being sample code, it’s not directly useful (hint: divide everything by 60 * time_scale and get rid of the check for integer input), but it’s better than nothing.

A few minutes of work could turn this into a Dashboard Widget that significantly extended QP’s navigation options. Hmm, maybe I should see if someone’s done it already, or if the widget world is still composed almost exclusively of screen scrapers and search boxes.

Update: I hacked on Apple’s sample widgets and created QuickNudge. No error checking, no spiffy icon, but it lets me adjust the playhead in precise increments. I haven’t written the “set playhead to time X” part yet, but I included the necessary AppleScripts.