Microsoft are giving away free copies of the Flip4Mac player to let you play Windows Media 9 in Quicktime. You still have to pay for the version that lets you make WMV content but it’s good to finally have an alternative to the buggy player Microsoft ships for free. Get it from this link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/flip4mac.mspx
if only Apple would follow suit and get rid of Quicktime player for PC’s so that we can play it fine without their BS software.
good that microsoft has steped up to the plate finally on it.
Alltaken
It’s actually rather funny:
Apple’s media player is freaking unbearably bad on windows.
Microsofts is just as awful on os x
Thanks for that! Quite cool. Sometimes causes Quicktime to unexpectedly quit for me though…
–Colin
I thought VLC played Quicktime for Windows and Linux. Also, I used Quicktime under Windows and it worked quite well. It doesn’t drain your CPU when you try to play video higher than 256kbps anyway. A lot of professionals deliver content from Windows for Quicktime so if it was that bad why would they bother?
Most complaints I hear about Quicktime concern video quality but Quicktime is not a format. It just so happens that media pros often use the Sorenson 3 codec for encoding with Quicktime and it isn’t great quality.
One thing I can think of is maybe to do with the graphics cards. I doubt Apple would write a DirectX display component and since DirectX is more supported than OpenGL on Windows then Apple wouldn’t want to have it not work for some users like Blender. Maybe Windows Quicktime has no support for hardware acceleration. It wouldn’t entirely be Apple’s fault though.
Not quite. A 3rd party company stepped up to the plate and offered a solution. Microsoft just bought it from them.
If you have Quicktime 7.0.4, there are some issues. It could also be that some older Flip4Mac doesn’t support some wmv files - usually older ones but I use MPlayer to play them.
the issue for me is more one of forcing Itunes download with Quicktime.
i know there is quicktime alternative and that is what i use. but its not official from Apple.
i don’t really like WMP being on my computer in the first place (the software) nor do i want yet another media player like Quicktime, or Real to watch proprietry formats.
.mov format is fine, i think its good, i encode to qt or Mov over avi or wmv all the time, but i don’t like to rely on software i will only use once in a blue moon.
hence IMO codecs are fine but more than that is annoying.
Alltaken
Quicktime Alternative (http://www.free-codecs.com/download/QuickTime_Alternative.htm) works great. 1.67 had some issues on my work system, so I had to downgrade to 1.55, but maybe they fixed the problems in the new beta, so I’ll actually be able to see QT7 movies.