Quick Time - Not for the squeamish!

AlanC wrote on 8/9/2006, 8:49 AM
Sick to death of Quick Time. Every time I'm forced to use it I can play something once. When it finishes playing the pause button toggles back to a play button. I hit it again and it plays about 95% of the movie then hangs. The play button never comes back. It just sits there locking up my PC, frustrating the hell out of me. There's nothing Quick about Quick Time for me.

Grazie, please don't post any more links to QT players. Please don't, please don't, please don't.

Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 8/9/2006, 9:31 AM
Alan,

Do you think the other 800 million QuickTime users are having the same experience? They don't.

Are you perhaps using the latest version of Firefox with an old QT plug-in?

The nice thing about QT is that you can manually scroll and scrub back and forth in a QT video, which you normally can't do in say WMV files. You can even go frame-by-frame, or jump back and forth between chapter points, etc.

Without using special streaming servers, QT videos start playing quickly.

More interactivity than WMV allows.

The player can also handle a lot of format conversions.

And for producers with also a Mac audience,know that QT players can now playback WMV content seamlessly on Macs, thanks to Flip4Mac (a free Universal Binary download). They even play XDCAM footage directly...

Personally, my favorite is Flash 8 overall but QT is better for some uses.
AlanC wrote on 8/9/2006, 9:44 AM
Using Netscape 7.2 and QT Player 7.0.3.

I know 7.1 is available but I've had the lock up problem with several versions of QT.

Incidentally I'm on W2k SP4. Perhaps Quick Time runs better on XP I don't know. All I know is it causes me grief with a capital "G".

Alan
Jay-Hancock wrote on 8/9/2006, 11:08 AM
Alan - maybe you already know this, but for sure if you are using QT files as source media in Vegas or if rendering to .mov, you should install QT 6 with it's "authoring components", because they don't exist in the free version of QT7 and you won't be able to use .mov files with Vegas. Maybe the Pro version of QT 7 doesn't have this issue, but for sure the free download version does.

QT 6 was around when NT SP4 was mainstream, so maybe it'll have better results for you. (I don't know that, only speculating...) Might not be true if files generated in higher versions of QT have different features, but again I don't know...
apit34356 wrote on 8/9/2006, 11:22 AM
"Do you think the other 800 million QuickTime users are having the same experience? They don't. " So we have 800 million Quicktime users, running on 800 million pcs connected to the internet. Very interesting, probably all are in LA., that explains the electrical power problems in CA.
Grazie wrote on 8/9/2006, 11:45 AM

Calm down, calm down dear . . it's only an apple . .


riredale wrote on 8/9/2006, 12:15 PM
I removed QT last month and installed "QuickTime Alternative." It's a fraction of the size of the original and seems to run well.
AlanC wrote on 8/9/2006, 12:37 PM
"Calm down, calm down dear . . it's only an apple . . "

With a rotten core! :~)

"and you won't be able to use .mov files with Vegas" Well I only have the freebie version and I can import .mov into Vegas. Maybe it's because I have VLC Media Player.
Coursedesign wrote on 8/9/2006, 1:01 PM
Very interesting, probably all are in LA., that explains the electrical power problems in CA.

No, the electrical overload from around-the-clock airconditioning recently has been exacerbated by the many recently purchased home TV plasma screens, according to DWP, our local power company, which also says a large plasma screen uses as much electricity as a large refrigerator (normally the #1 household energy consumer).

I don't know the exact number of QT users worldwide, but it is huge, on multiple platforms, and the problems experienced by Alan recently have not been reported anywhere else I've seen (and my work depends on knowing about any such problems).

deusx wrote on 8/9/2006, 1:17 PM
It's time to kill off quicktime. It's bordering on spyware just like real player. Flash is far superior, it just needs to get some content protection mechanism, and bye bye quicktime and windows media.

they both suck.
Stuart Robinson wrote on 8/9/2006, 1:24 PM
For what it's worth, I have QuickTime on one Windows XP machine and it's terrible. There's a hang of at least thirty seconds before the program starts and lengthy delays when trying to issue any command.

I have another objection; if you buy a license for QuickTime but also have iTunes on the same machine, when (if) you upgrade iTunes you have no choice but to upgrade QuickTime too, and that often returns it back to the free mode. You have to purchase it again and that's a bit naughty on the part of Apple.

Can't say I'm a fan either to be honest.

If you'd like to see a small (OK vast) number of QuickTime problem reports, take a look at:

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=122
Coursedesign wrote on 8/9/2006, 2:08 PM
when (if) you upgrade iTunes you have no choice but to upgrade QuickTime too, and that often returns it back to the free mode.

When you say "often", do you mean "once"?

This happened when QT went from 6 to 7, and Apple warned specifically that any QT6 Pro would be overwritten with the new free QT7 that was needed for the latest iTunes.

Not as convenient for the user certainly, and one might wish that they could have come up with a way for QT6 Pro and QT7 to co-exist. The problem with that is probably DLL conflicts and what to open QT files with.

So it's another $30 to Apple if you need QT7 Pro, unless you have Final Cut which includes it.
farss wrote on 8/9/2006, 2:57 PM
Don't know anyone who doesn't have issues with QT (that includes one Macolite), I no longer even bother to jump through all the hoops or tolerate Apples nagware to watch anything QT.
Jay-Hancock wrote on 8/9/2006, 3:28 PM
I'm not an advocate of QT, but as far as I know neither flash nor wmv provide an alpha channel. I prefer importing an mov file over a huge, hundreds-of-megabyte Targa sequence (or pict sequence, etc.).
Stuart Robinson wrote on 8/9/2006, 4:06 PM
>When you say "often", do you mean "once"?<

Twice in my experience, which is often because that's about how many times I've been through a major iTunes revision! Luckily I only have QuickTime on one PC. :-)

>Apple warned specifically that any QT6 Pro would be overwritten with the new free QT7 that was needed for the latest iTunes.<

Fair enough there were warnings, but still, it's not on. Why lose the paid-for functionality of one application just because another is updated? Each application should be self-contained IMHO.