Slick. Speedy. Sexy. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. You could easily replace the word “snow” in “Snow Leopard” with any other “s” adjective and still describe it accurately. Snow Leopard, by Apple’s own admission, is “The worlds most advanced operating system [Leopard]. Finely tuned.” It is, however, a truly unique experience for Mac users. And for 29 bucks, it can not be denied that this is easily the best OS upgrade the Mac has ever seen.

QuickTime Pro has long been Apple’s paid upgrade to the QuickTime media player software, unlocking some minor features in the software such as video encoding, iSight / mic recording, and the ability to save videos from the Internet. It currently costs $29.99 for either the Windows or Mac version. The latest seeds of of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard are suggesting that Apple may in fact be eliminating the QuickTime Pro upgrade entirely

It seems the MacBook refresh may have brought a new feature to OS X in the form of GPU accelerated h.264 video decoding. Currently, improvements to CPU load can be seen with new MacBooks, but the feature could find its way on to a Mac with appropriate hardware near you.

Some MacRumors forum members have been talking about how the new MacBooks handle HD video content.

Mac OS X v10.6 is the first of the big cats to be named for a different breed of a previous version. After all, we didn’t rush out to buy Siberian Tiger this past October. As the naming convention implies, there’s not a lot of difference between Leopard and Snow Leopard, at least as far as the end user in concerned. Apple’s info page is sparse, but at least gives us some insight on what to expect.

Learn more after the break.