i hate QUICKTIME.
i apologised in the subject because i know a lot of mac users are a little sensitive about people who seem to be criticising their way of life. please understand - i'm not saying i hate you, or even the mac operating system. my problem is with the windows implementations of quicktime.
any games, or CDs included with books, or applications or even websites which use quicktime will say "you need version x", or "version y" - and nobody uses the same version. an example: i have this way cool university level book on astronomy: "Discovering the Universe", by Kaufmann and Comins. it comes with a CD, with some short videos. in quicktime format. you are required to install version 2.0, which comes with the CD. earlier or even later versions won't work.
the uninstallers usually fail ("Uninstall failed due to: Error -0". MINUS ZERO?), so you end up with pieces of several different versions lying around, in different directories, all conflicting with each other. if you desperately need one to work you usually have to reinstall that version over the top of the others and hope for the best.
the windows quicktime players show jerky, poor quality video, often without sound (and that's not due to the quality or size of the file, either - a sixty megabyte .MOV will look just as shitty as a 2 meg .AVI).
if you want to watch quicktime videos embedded in a webpage these days you have to install quicktime 7[1]. what irritates me is that it also installs several services which run on startup - things like "connect to the apple i-store", and unless you've got an iPod, or you're too dumb to find online music anywhere else, a windows user is not going to need this.
you'll see the little icon down next to the time display. you can't close the program (it doesn't have an "exit" option) short of uninstalling quicktime completely. you aren't given a choice of not installing the i-store thing; it's like getting cable TV and having the installer kick several large holes in your living room wall.
there are a couple of windows programs which claim to be able to convert .MOV to, say, .AVI; some of them crash on startup, some don't do anything and some just say "please install quicktime 7".
Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing frequently complains about not being able to play windows .WMV videos on his mac. i feel his pain. truly.
[1] unless you want to mess with the Satanic and mysterious Quicktime Alternative Project. needless to say, the quicktime player it includes doesn't do anything at all.
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