I welcome your comments and experiences/bug reports/fixes regarding Quicktime 4.0 public beta (and now 4.01 final). I'm very interested to hear if the Audio playback/capture issue that was commonly reported has been fixed (QT4 was rumored to fix this but apparently hasn't). What's odd are the reports that the final version has the same audio quality issue that was 'fixed' in the 2nd beta update. One reader sent a fix for this (restoring the sound manager from QT v3.0).

Apple's recent TIL updates page has many Quicktime 4 related articles including a QT 4 FAQ and QT 4 Known Issues. Gamers or those interested in the latest QD3D should do the full install of QT 4 to make sure QD3D v1.6 is installed.

I've divided the page into 3 areas, use the links below to jump to a specific section.

Problem/Bug Reports:

QT 4 Final Audio Fix: Several readers reported the final QT 4 had the same audio quality issues reported in the early beta. Axel writes that using the Sound Manager from QT 3 solved the problem

" Use Sound Manager 3.3. It works. No problems at all. Quake sounded crappy with [sound manager] 3.4, so I swapped it with 3.3 from QT3 and I've never looked back...
Regards,
Axel Dunstan"

[from 5/5/99 main site news] - A reader notes that the latest B22 Quicktime 4 release noted earlier today fixed the sound quality issues of the previous version:

"The new QT4 beta 22 update does replace the sound manager extension with a new version that fixed the ambient finder sounds bug for me on a 7600/Newer G3/250 with OS 8.5.1.
Joseph Snodgrass"

This area lists problems/bugs/specific issues. Here are a few specific problem reports (since degraded audio is the most common, all new reports are grouped together):

QT4/MP3 Playback Tip: If you kept a copy of Movieplayer 2.5 around this tip may help:

" Quite a few people have noticed the "jumpy" mp3 playback. One solution that works well for me is to tell Movieplayer to preload the entire MP3 to RAM.

So far, I can only do this in Movieplayer v2.5 with the add-ons. In the Info window, under Soundtrack and then Preload, there are options for "Preload" and "Cache hint". I'm not quite sure what cache hint does, but I have them both checked. To make this work correctly, I had to close the file (Save As a different name so I don't change the original, keeping dependencies so that I don't eat up hard drive space), and re-open the new file. At this point, even the new Player will open and load the file correctly, assuming it has the RAM it needs.

This plays smothly even if I hold down a menu--which, on my system, seems to put everything on hold. The only quirk is an somewhat jumpy mouse. Oh, and sometimes opening up an application just after I hit play, will crash me.
--steven lee "

Word 97 Attachments Affected?

"Hi People: I tried QT 4 and for the most part it worked OK. However, all the MS Word 97 attachments to client e-mail messages turned into QT movies. I could actually play them and see the text and formatting instructions as QT frames. It looked like a scene from "The Matrix". It was entertaining, but not very useful for our design and illustration business.

When I went back to QT 3, the attachments became normal MS Word documents. This wouldn't be the Evil Empire trying to sabotage Quicktime would it..........
Bob Simpson
Carol*Simpson Productions"

AOL Instant Messenger Problem & Memory Allocation Tip:

" After installing QT 4.0, I had a problem with AOL Instant Messenger crashing (system just hangs) whenever somebody sent me a message. Updating to the latest version of AIM didn't help. I discovered the problem after hearing of some of the audio issues some people are having- it only happens when AIM tries to speak the incoming text using Plaintalk. Strangely, the AIM speech test button works properly, and Plaintalk worked fine in Simpletext.

Downgrading the Sound Manager to the previous version stops the crashes from happening.

Other crashes I was having while watching multiple movies in the Quicktime Player, and watching steaming video in Appleworks were solved by increasing the memory allocation for those programs.
Scott Nourse "

MP3 Saved File/Playback Issues:

"QuickTime 4.0 has impressed me in many ways. One of the nicest is streaming downloads of mp3s... which is great, until the streaming ends and I have to save the file.

So, I hit command-S and save it as a "QuickTime Movie" (the default). While the MP3 played perfectly before it was saved in this format (standard mp3 is not an option), it becomes unplayably jerky when re-opened after being saved by QT4.

This also occures when I open one of my pre-existing mp3 filess in QuickTime Player and save it; skipping becomes horendous, even though QuickTime Player could play it perfectly before the save.

My system is a beige G3/300 running OS 8.5. Symptoms are identical with VM on and off.

This is really a terrible bug for us Audiophiles. Fix, Apple, Fix!
Peter Curtis "

" I'm experiencing jerky feedback with mp3s when using QT4's player. Maybe there's some tweaking I need to do to get it to work, but I shouldn't think so. I'm running 8.5.1 on a G3 with 384 meg of RAM on board. It is definitely a multi-tasking issue -- I experience stops and starts when something else is happening, but there's no way I'm going to stop doing everything and listen to an mp3 file. Nope.
Any ideas?
Mike Carvalho
The DW Communications Group "

Office 98 Animated Assistants
Mixed reports on this one...

"I have a G3 B/W and the Word assistant works fine under QT 4-at least the little mac on legs. Chris "

"Hi Mike,
QT 4 works flawlessly in my 400 Yose, but I noticed that the animated assistants in Office 98 are not available, I get an alert that QT is not installed. Maybe Office does not recognize QT 4? This, of course, is a minor inconvenience, although I thought the little dog was amazingly cute coming from MS…
Konrad"

PowerLogix Cache Control issues:

" [removed long gripe on downloading issues, firewall errors,etc. ]
One major problem I had was as soon as it was installed, it wouldn't start up, crashing regularly and consistently at the time the Powerlogix G3 cdev was loaded. Every time. Fortunately solved by forcing the G3 cdev to run first.
Paul C. "

Browser Issues:

" Hi Mike
I expirienced the Sound quality problem as well. Removing Sound Manager helped to improve the quality, but with all streaming contents i saw Explorer 4.5 and Navigator 4.51 quitting with Error 3.
Keep up your excellent site !!! Alex Huber "

Jackhammer SCSI Card Issue/Improved movie playback

" Hello Mike,
I had a couple of problems at home when I installed QT4. After doing the mandatory restart, I noticed that the extension for my JackHammer UW SCSI card was X'd out. I also got a message from QT4 telling me that it was missing a component. I thought that strange given that I'd just installed it.

I chose to add the component so the QT4 Update application launched, downloaded and installed a 69kb piece. No restart was necessary so it must be a library of some sort. I then re-installed JackHammer 1.3.2 and restarted again. All has been fine since.

With QT3 I had noticed some minor video defects and dropped frames when I played the Star Wars Episode I trailers with either Movie Player 3.0 or 2.5.1. I thought that I had a perfectly configured system: 315/315MHz G3 card, 7200rpm UW SCSI drive, ix3D UltimateRez card, 144MB of RAM, VM off, 16-bit colour.

Those same "buggy" trailers now play perfectly smooth at DOUBLE size in 24-bit colour mode :-)
Happy with QT4 so far,
David "

TurboTV Issues

" QT4 seems to disable the ixMicro ixTV TV tuner card. After installing QT4, running the ixTV Desktop app gives an error saying that "the hardware or software was installed improperly." I didn't get a chance to try reverting back to QT3 last night to see if it would work again, so I'll check it tonight. I've already sent a note to ixMicro and posted on Apple's bug board.
Steven Strell "

" I thought that I should mention that the new QT 4 deluxe intall has rendered my ixMicro ixTV useless on my B&W G3/300. It was a bit buggy before (with the ATI extension conflicts), but now its kaput!
Regards,
M D Miller "

In the past, disabling the Vdig extension was a tip for ATI users and some software issues. (noted on the B&W G3 Compatibility page as well).

Unreal Mixed Reports:

" It seems as if unreal runs alot faster since I updated to QT4 . I am going to test some frame rates later mark "

" Hi! Well, I have a B+W G3 350/ 256mb RAM and I have a problem with Unreal and QT4. Unreal just starts up normally and at the end of loading up to start it stays at a blank black screen. I disabled QT4 and all is fine now. I suppose ill have to revert back to the 3.02 version? well off to play unreal! Bye!
minigoat{CS} "

MP850 (VT 3Dfx Banshee) Issues:

"Hi Mike, just thought I'd throw my QT4 experiences into the mix.

The bad news: My MP850's quicktime accelerators are a tad buggy with the new QuickTime Player. There is a horizontal blue strip at the bottom of movies, and a vertical strip that eats up part of the righthand edge of movies. This always happens except when the movie is played back at "actual size" (command-1) I tried to get a screenshot of this, but it seems that the MP850's QT accelerator uses some interesting tricks to do the drawing; the movie area was disproportioned and odd looking in the screen dump, where it was perfectly clean on screen.

In the past, the blue-ish areas indicated that MP850 QuickTime acceleration wasn't working properly, and a few seconds of playing would get it to kick back in. This usually happened when you did something like move the window, obscure it with another active movie, or do something odd like that.

Curiously enough, when I obscure any part of the movie with part of another application, the entire movie is shown, and the blue chunks vanish. The movie plays sluggishly, though, when I do that; I think that in situations like that the MP850 QT accelerators stop accelerating, which would explain what's going on in that case.

The good news: Keep your old version of MoviePlayer around, because it still works perfectly with the MP850. [Note - the same tip applied when upgrading to non-Pro QT 3.0 (saving 2.5 player preserved functions removed in the free QT 3.0 player-Mike] Additionally, because it has less interface baggage surrounding the movie, movies played "full screen" will have a larger movie area than movies played "full screen" under the new Quicktime Player. This isn't normally an issue, except when you want to play something that really deserves all the visual real estate you can give it, like the second Phantom Menace trailer.

-Hans Andersen
P.S. Many thanks for hosting a page on MP850 tips [see main page sidebar links-Mike], it has really been useful to me. "

GameSprockets Beta

"I had a conflict with the game sprockets beta, removing the last traces of the GS beta allowed QT4beta to run beautifully on my Rev1 G3/266
Benjamin S.
[he later wrote regarding the Gamesprockets beta:]
I think I originally downloaded a beta set (in one of the SDKs) from Apple's developer pages. I can't remember exactly which page and I don't have the files any more, sorry. But Input Sprocket 1.4.1b2 comes w/ StarCraft. I'm guessing though, that the IS beta from StarCraft was probably at fault, because I had managed to remove the betas from the SDK before. "

PowerBook G3/300 w/OpenGL and QT 4 - DVD works In reply to the problem post below a reader notes:

"I have a PB 300/DVD running 8.5.1 with the beta OpenGL and QT 4.0 and DVD video works great. I just tried a co-worker's new "A Bug's Life" DVD and the few minutes of it we played (we're at work after all) went through beautifully.
Lang Shen Chen "

Disabled PowerBook DVD

" After installing QT 4, my Powerbook would no longer recognize my DVD PC Card. I removed it, and went back to QT 3 and all problems went away though. If anyone has found a workaround let me know.
Pat Pike"

I asked him if the QT4 install disabled or removed any DVD related extensions (he later replied that he did try reinstalling DVD software, no luck. Only restoring QT3 helped.) If anyone has a known fix please contact me.

MP3 Crashing/Multitasking:

"Just some more QT4 feedback, with something I haven't seen yet on your site: After a successful installation last night, my machine crashed whilst playing an mp3: It took 3 reboots to get back into the finder (kept crashing at different stages), and even then my machine crashed when I tried to launch the extensions manager. It really doesn't like multitasking either - when playing anything, especially midi files, if I try and run anything like Netscape at the same time the machine locks up, sometimes requiring 2 reboots before getting back into the Finder.

On the plus side, mp3 playback is very good - smooth, and slightly better quality than MacAmp. MIDI playback is also very good, although I did notice a few skipped notes in some tracks.
Oh, and the interface is VERY cool.
Great site,
Toby Austin "

Audio Quality Reduced?
Audio quality reduction (even when M/S rate is set to 44KHz) is the most common complaint - here's the latest reports:

" Just a quick note about Qt4 on my Powerbook G3 series 233, I just upgraded to Qt4 and the sound quality has really gone in the dumpster. Audio Cds, start up sound, System sounds, and most importantly, the sound track of my beloved Indy Car Racing 2 game. The engine sound is very broken up and sounds like an air line bubbling away in a fish tank! I have tried throwing away the Sound Prefs, which worked temporarily, but the problem returns, I guess I will need to find a copy of the old Sound Manager.
Nick "

" I installed QT4 on my iMac (rev. A, UK 8.5.1), and found that the Finder sounds would randomly be distorted - especially those with low tones, like the empty trash one. Removing Sound Manager 4 fixed this. Since I never bother with streaming media, I can live without it for the moment.
Robert "

The 3D Gaming News update today has a note from a Rave Quake user saying QT 4's later version of Sound manager (v3.4b21) affected audio quality in Quake. Restoring the original sound manager v3.3 resolved the problem he said. (Frank said he had no such problem). Remember when problems arise to try and remove any 3rd party extensions first, which can often be a contributing factor. Conflict Catcher 8 is a great tool for troubleshooting conflicts (crashes/errors, etc.) Update: Another reader reports audio quality reduction after the update:

"Mike i have this same problem. I have a blue & white 350mhz and noticed my alert sounds were being played at a lower quality (22khz) maybe [Monitors and sound audio settings usually control rate, except in some games-Mike]. Which also made quake sound like crap. I removed sound manager and that fixed the problem, but then when viewing streaming movies off the web there was no audio.
Ron Timms"

Ramdoubler 8.0.1 Conflict

"I've tired QuickTime 4.0 last night. Only problem was, computer would freeze up as soon as the background picture shows up. I done some conflict tests and found out it's my RamDoubler 8.0.1. It worked okay after I disabled RamDoubler. Except for Internet Explorer locking up when I run mp3 under Movie Player. I hope the final version fixes this bug.
Young Baek "

Problems with non-Apple Control Strip Addons::

" Today you posted a report from a reader who's control strip would not work after installing QT4. I had the same problem until I removed the ATI Desktop Control Strip from the Control Strip Modules Folder. It worked fine after that. I imagine that ATI Desktop has not been revised for QT4.
Brent Hecht "

The author of the original post on control strip problems sent an update indicating it is a conflict with a 3rd party addon:

" The conflict I emailed you about before seems to be triggered by Extensions Strip Control by Ammon Skidmore. Had it running perfectly on 8.6b9 until I installed Quicktime 4b21. The machine wouldn't restart or shutdown because "the program unknown couldn't be quit" even though the Finder was the only thing running. "

Troubleshooting Rule number one - when problems occur, always simplify, removing 3rd party extensions and addons first.

Adam Dluzniewski wrote to say he was impressed and noticed smoother than v3 movie playback, but noted that MP3 tracks did not play smoothly from CD, which MacAMP does on his 360Mhz G3 card upgraded 8500. He also did not like the delivery method (Win98 update style off the net).

Fixes for Past Issues: This area will list any reported fixes for problems seen with QT v3 and earlier with hardware and software:

ATI/Miles Issue Fixed? I'm also wondering if the rumored Audio playback/capture issue that was commonly reported has been fixed.

" Mike:
QuickTime 4 seems to fix the ATI Graphics Accelerator/Initio Miles conflict in the B&W G3s. The extension now loads (did not run the Initio bios update). [The Rage128 Feedback page has other tips that often help loading issues like enabling VM or renaming ATI extensions to load first-Mike]

Also, wanted to point out that my control strip continues to work fine with QuickTime 4 installed.
Jamie Peloquin "

Wish List/Missing Features:

" Here are some quirks I've run across with QT4:

1) What is the point of that darn pause button? The play button when pressed should turn to pause. Although, the play button does function as a play/pause button it just doesn't look like it does. If you hit the pause button it pauses the clip, hitting it again does nothing, You have to hit play again to get the file to go again. I think that Apple should make the pause button stop as there is no convenient way for you to get the clip to return to the beginning of the file by simply pushing a button.

2) The playlist:
Although it is cool it is most useless in current form. If you place a movie file in it puts a picture of the first frame (which is usually black) and NO NAME! Same goes for MP3's. Also one click should open the playlist tray.

3) Streaming:
When I click on a stream and it opens it in the player opposed to the browser 2 players open up. One is empty, the other is playing the stream. The streams themselves look awful on my high speed DSL connection

4) MP3:
The playback is terrible Skips even on G3's when simply surfing the net. Many of my MP3's wont even play.

5) Feedback:
WERE THE HECK IS THAT FEEDBACK FORM APPLE TALKS ABOUT IN THE READ ME? Hundreds of people are wanting to give there suggestions and bug reports with no were to turn! Common Apple, we are beta testing for you!
Thanks,
Mark Tuleweit
Byte Media "

ScanLine Mode:

"Hi Mike,
nice idea to setup a Quicktime 4 feedback site. After Apple released the first beta of QT 3 I wrote them an email that it would be great to add a scanline playback feature to the final version....without any response. Adding a scanline mode to QT4 is one of my favorite wishes! Another great feature would be a switchable layer for any opened window (e.g. Browser-Window) on that you can draw on with the mouse or type some text. This would be great for presentations or developer converences over a network.
Bye, Rene Trost"

Playlist Wishes:

" My experience with the new movie player has been very positive so far but the one interface enhancement I would wish for is that when the movie player opens a movie near the size of your screen the tray could slide out sideways or the movie could be aligned top right and the tray could come from wherever there is the most real estate. Coming from the bottom it gets cutoff to easily with large video files.

I wish it would also fix a bug that's been bugging me since QT 3. In windows you cannot have a Reference movie that references an MPEG work on windows, i.e. Opens it and plays it doubled.
Josh Lewis "

" Wish List Item:
I love the new capability to play mp3s, however I hope that in the final version the playlist will be a small icon/text list instead of just an icon. It would also be nice to be able to play movies full screen without going into presentation mode (maybe as a "Command-4" option?)
Mark "

"Hello Mike, As a UI designer and a DV editor I love the new look of QT4 and well not to mention FinalCutPro. However, while I'm working I like to be able load a few hours of mp3's into my player and forget about it. I can't see that I can do that with QT4, maybe this will show up in the release. Right now I'm thinking what's the point, I don't want to load a new track every 5mins. The favorites drawer is cool even though it's very Kai.
Thanks that's my rant
Scott Smith "