Preview & Watch Videos Directly in Spotlight

From Mac OS X Lion and onward, videos and movie files can be previewed and played directly in the Spotlight search results menu. To try this out for yourself:

1. Hit Command+Space and search for a movie or video file
2. Hover over the video search result until the thumbnail preview pops up to the left
3. Hover over the thumbnail to find a “Play” button

This isn’t really a viable option to watch a long video, but it is extremely useful to quickly locate a specific video or a scene within some movie file without opening a ton of individual files into QuickTime Player.

A similar feature lets you play videos directly in a Finder window, that feature works in Mac OS X 10.6 and earlier as well.