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User profile for user: John Asher
John Asher Author
User level: Level 1
9 points

Cursor disappears after fullscreen video.

After upgrading to Lion, my cursor started disappearing during fullscreen video playback and after I exit in iTunes, as well as VLC. Does it every time. Fullscreen video through Safari does not have this problem. I know the cursor should disappear initially, but when I want to use the popup controls or after I exit it still doesn't come back. I can restore the cursor by entering Mission Control.


Anybody else have this problem? Any fixes?


The video is also glitchy in iTunes Store when I'm watching a movie trailer. The lower left corner of the video is playing in the center of the video window, so I can only see a quarter of the video. Not 100% of the time, and sometimes it fixes itself after a few seconds. I usually enter fullscreen when this happens, which fixes the video position problem, but of course the cursor goes away. When the video ends, it kicks me out to the desktop and I have to swipe to view iTunes.


These problems happen both with the laptop alone and when it's connected to HDTV.

MacBook Air, Mac OS X (10.7.1), Late 2010 MacBook Air

Posted on Sep 13, 2011 3:09 PM

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User profile for user: Canny
Canny
User level: Level 1
9 points

Posted on Sep 21, 2011 11:42 AM

You're not alone and, for me at least, this isn't just happening in video applications (though obviously the video preview problem is !) so my guess is it's Lion.


My "solution" so far has been to use CMD+TAB to open the app switcher and then immediately hit CMD+` to switch back to iTunes or whatever I was in when it disappeared. The cursor then reappears.


As for the itunes preview - if you switch it to fullscreen and back it should be fine (at least until you try to preview another show) except of course you run the risk of having your cursor disappear again. Now have to use four keyboard shortcuts to work around something that used to work just fine, not exactly ideal.


After a few deep breaths all you can do is remind yourself that its not a trivial piece of software and hope that it gets fixed soon.

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User profile for user: Canny
Canny
User level: Level 1
9 points

Sep 21, 2011 11:42 AM in response to John Asher

You're not alone and, for me at least, this isn't just happening in video applications (though obviously the video preview problem is !) so my guess is it's Lion.


My "solution" so far has been to use CMD+TAB to open the app switcher and then immediately hit CMD+` to switch back to iTunes or whatever I was in when it disappeared. The cursor then reappears.


As for the itunes preview - if you switch it to fullscreen and back it should be fine (at least until you try to preview another show) except of course you run the risk of having your cursor disappear again. Now have to use four keyboard shortcuts to work around something that used to work just fine, not exactly ideal.


After a few deep breaths all you can do is remind yourself that its not a trivial piece of software and hope that it gets fixed soon.

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User profile for user: switchbacker
switchbacker
User level: Level 1
9 points

Jan 26, 2012 4:27 PM in response to John Asher

I have had this problem with the cursor disappearing - very annoying. I deal with it by having a hot corner to activate expose. So when the cursor disappears, I shove the mouse to the upper left, expose activates bringing the cursor back, and then I shove the mouse again to go back to what I was watching.


The other problem I have is that when watching a video from the iTunes store (e.g., a rented movie), if I try to switch from stereo to surrround sound, iTunes crashes. It doesn't matter if I pause the video first or not. I then relaunch iTunes and I'm able to switch, but it's really slow.


I lost a rental once because of this - I started to play it just as it was finishing downloading, and tried to switch to surround sound. ITunes crashed of course, and when I relaunched it the rental was gone, probably because it finished downloading and was in the process of moving it when it crashed. I could not re-download it because as far as iTunes was concerned, it was completed so there were no downloads waiting. I had to rent it again and got into a big fight with Apple over the double charge. Now I wait until it finishes downloading completely before starting the movie (it still crashes, but at least I haven't lost a rental again).

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User profile for user: d'ran
d'ran
User level: Level 1
4 points

Feb 13, 2012 7:50 PM in response to John Asher

Same problem - tried various resets and normal trouble shooting. I have other accounts on same mac, and it happens on all accounts. Very repeatable - opening video (movie/podcast/music-video/tv-show) when it goes to full screen, i lose the pointer - I get it back by swiping to dashboard. Other apps will occasionally have similiar effect, but itunes is very repeatable.

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Cursor disappears after fullscreen video.

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