Support Quick Look macOS extensions for video/audio

[neg2sode]

What you want IINA to do:
I click on the mkv/mka file and press space, then I can preview it.

What IINA does currently:
Currently, I 'quick look' on the file and I just get file info.

Why you think this should be added:
'Quick Look' has been a core feature of macOS.
I think IINA could be as modern as it could be.

Examples of other projects that have something similar:
Pixelmator has Quick Look extensions and it's been REALLY handy for me to preview a project.

[neg2sode]

Plus, Thumbnails is part of Quick Look too, in addition to Preview.

[low-batt]

In the meantime you can get macOS Finder to display thumbnails and provide "quick look" for many video formats using the open source project QuickLook Video. There are limitations imposed by macOS/Finder as discussed in the QuickLook README.

I have this package installed and can see thumbnails for .mkv files in Finder under macOS Monterey:

A downside is that QuickLook Video does not support a Open in IINA button. 😞

[zqzten]

+1 for this feature. It would be great if IINA can provide built-in video preview extension with the modern appex format instead of an external legacy qlgenerator like the QLVideo mentioned above.

[saagarjha]

Do you have a specific reason for preferring the new QuickLook plugin architecture, other than it being newer? As in, are there any new features we're missing by not using it?

[zqzten]

@saagarjha Thanks for paying attention to this. There're mainly two reasons for a new extension as for now:

1. Being newer is actually an important thing, since Apple has deprecated qlgenerator, the legacy plugins would no longer be usable in future releases of macOS sooner or later. So if we want to keep the quicklook function, we'll have to rewrite it as appex eventually. This can also improve user experience as they don't need to install a standalone quicklook plugin manually.
2. There's another thing that I'm not comfortable with QLVideo - It can only preview some screenshots, not playable content like the native supported video formats. I'm not a pro on this and not sure if that's really applicable but I believe a playable preview would be super helpful and cool to end users.

[HarukaMa]

The last time I've been investigating this was several years ago, but the main limitation was that you can only use AVPlayer which only supports formats that QuickTime could play. QLVideo was generating some thumbnails in the time allowed by the system then presented them as a HTML document instead (from my experience most of the third party QL plugins are using HTML).

I've not experimented with the appex approach as I'm still running macOS 10.15. Maybe you'll be able to run a long running thread and draw the frames directly?

[saagarjha]

Last I checked there still isn't any way to put arbitrary content into a QuickLook preview.