How Do I Get a Movie To Play At Startup On OS X 10.5 iMac?

Comments: 2 Responses to “How Do I Get a Movie To Play At Startup On OS X 10.5 iMac?”

Gary Rosenzweig

11 years ago

Interesting problem. Here's how to do it. I'm using OS X 10.8 to do this, I hope it is close enough to what you need in 10.5.
First, you need to create an application that will run the movie. QuickTime Player will do it, of course, but you need to wrap that in a specific application that will launch, open that movie specifically, and then play it -- full screen, preferably.
Do this with Automator. Start up Automator and create an application. These should only be two actions in this application: Get Specified Movies and Play Movies. The first action gives you a list where you can drag and drop movies to play. So drag and drop that one movie file into the list. The second action gives you some options, including full screen and looping. You can set the video to loop a bunch of times, which may be useful -- but see my warning later on.
Then save this application somewhere, perhaps to the Desktop.
Now go into System Preferences and the user accounts (forget what they called that in 10.5). Add this application to the Login Items for the primary account. I assume you also want to set this account to be one that automatically logs in at startup too. So set it up like that while you are there.
Now when you start up, it should log into that account and run Login Items, launching that app. That app opens and plays that movie.
Here's a warning about looping: I tried this with 9999 loops. Worked great. Except that I couldn't stop it. I had to fight with the keyboard and mouse to quit the QuickTime player and make changes to remote it from Login Items in-between the Mac looping the video. I was finally able to get it out of Login Items and do a restart.
It actually is a good thing, if this is for a kiosk. But still, I would have it loop only 1 or 2 times while setting this up, and only change it to a lot of times after you have tested and are satisfied.

Joe Allen

11 years ago

Gary said: "I had to fight with the keyboard and mouse ... ."

I would like to see a video of this bloody battle ... ((<: }