For the last month or so, I've been trying to track down a problem I've been having with Apple QuickTime on Vista, and I suspect the whole thing may simply be a fool's errand.
At first, I thought the problem was related to something I've seen reported in a number of circles: QuickTime has not played well on systems that use Intel SATA RAID controllers as the medium from which the content is played back. Most of the symptoms revolve around playing back HD content: on my end, if I try to play back full 1080 HD content on my system, it drops frames and skips like crazy, and the CPU utilization tops out. This, by the way, is on a dual-socket Opteron with 2GB of RAM and a 256MB AGP 8X video card.
On a whim, I browsed Apple's QuickTime support forum and encountered a couple of other people having the same issues. Most of the folks polled were running NVIDIA graphics or disk controllers (my video's ATI), and the one generic suggestion was to switch QuickTime back into "safe mode" (i.e., no DirectX or Direct3D acceleration). Not one of the changes to that setting made the slightest difference. Another workaround was to copy the playback media to a non-SATA drive, but this isn't always a possible option. If you play back QT content in the browser, for instance, it's copied to your local QT cache -- which is by default in your user profile and as far as I know cannot be moved somewhere else.
The problem was reported most egregiously on certain Intel disk controllers (and there's even been a fix supplied for it), but I'm starting to wonder if the same thing goes for other manufacturers as well. My own system uses a Silicon Image brand controller and has the most recent drivers provided by the manufacturer, so barring a fix from Apple or Microsoft, nothing's going to change. Actually, Microsoft has already rolled out a pre-SP1 patch for Vista that addresses a problem vaguely related to this. I requested the patch and applied it, but it made no discernible difference. I tried QuickTime Alternative to see if that made any difference, and as far as I can tell it didn't accomplish a thing.
Then my suspicions started to really ramp up. Maybe the whole disk issue was a red herring. I downloaded a number of HD clips in other formats--MPEG-2, VC-1--and guess what, they played back perfectly in Nero ShowTime, in full-screen, with barely 30% CPU usage and no frame drops. And when I saved the QuickTime file to disc and played it in Nero, it worked perfectly there as well (albeit with higher CPU consumption). Copying the file to an external IDE drive and playing it back that way didn't make it work any better in QuickTime, either -- but it STILL worked perfectly in Nero.
The only other thing I can think of is that somehow QuickTime is having trouble detecting how to work properly with DirectDraw (despite there being free video players that have absolutely no trouble figuring this out), which would sure explain why changing from DirectX to GDI ("safe") mode didn't accomplish a thing. Maybe it's stuck in GDI mode for keeps.
For now, my solution is simple: anything I need to play in QuickTime, I just dump out to disk and play through Nero -- at least until Apple bothers to write something for the PC that's halfway viable.
Shocking isn't it?!
Down the years of gotten so annoyed with Quicktime for various reasons where i make a point of NOT installing it now. Where possible i'll look for the video in an alternative format but if not then i generally decide it's not worth watching!
Suggestion: Media Player Classic and Quicktime Alternative.
This was pulled at Apple's insistence, now seems to be coming back but with what changes (if any?) I don't know. The version just before Apple threatened MPC with litigation should still be floating about on the Internet.