Quicktime won't play video but Finder will

July 18, 2005 3:29 AM

I have a problem playing a particular quicktime movie in the Quicktime 7 application itself even though the video plays fine when I "preview" it in the Finder under Mac OS X 10.4.2.

I have a quicktime file that will not play the video when I play it in Quicktime 7 player. The audio playback is fine but all I get is a gray screen in the quicktime video window. However, if I preview the in the Finder, by going to "Get Info" on the file, expanding the preview, and playing it there, the video shows up and it plays just fine. Therefore it seems the file is fine and that the underlying quicktime program in OS X sees the video just fine, yet it only displays a gray screen if I use Quicktime player it self to view it. Any help would be appreciated.

posted by gyc to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Now it seems that the Finder will also refuse to preview the video and will show a gray picture instead, although it had just worked earlier. The movie does play in mplayer however. The video codec is Sorensen 3 if that helps at all.
posted by gyc at 3:51 AM on July 18, 2005

I would try a "save as" in mplayer, if that is possible and then try QT again
posted by ouke at 4:38 AM on July 18, 2005

What happens if you try it (or at least the preview) after a reboot? If that doesn't change anything, I'd probably run over to Versiontracker and search for one of those applications that clean out the various OS X caches, and then try again. Alternately, on preview, what ouke said.
posted by kimota at 5:23 AM on July 18, 2005

A few weeks ago I upgraded to the newest version of QuickTime. After that I noticed some problems playing movies, then downgraded back to where I was before. Everything plays fine now... Might want to try that.
posted by pwb503 at 8:31 AM on July 18, 2005