I have a Quicktime file that plays on Macs but not PCs. Any idea why?

April 1, 2004 3:52 PM

Problems with Quicktime. I have a client who has a trailer for a movie on his web site and he gets complaints from people with Windows that they can't play the movie. It's in Quicktime format and plays perfectly on my Mac. The people who say it doesn't work all say they have the latest version of Quicktime. Anyone know what could be up?

Sorry if the Q is kinda vague. I don't really know much about video and don't know what to tell the client. The video was given to me already in Quicktiime format. I didn't encode it. What questions should I be asking the encoder or people trying to view it?

posted by dobbs to computers & internet (5 comments total)

What, exactly, happens when said users attempt to view the trailer? Which browsers and/or operating systems are experiencing this problem? Is the movie embedded within a Web page, or are they directed to the .mov file itself? Are they offering the file from a normal Web server or a dedicated streaming QuickTime service?

It could be any number of problems, all of which are impossible to diagnose without more information.
posted by Danelope at 4:26 PM on April 1, 2004

When the question is "I can view this movie on some platforms but not others," the #1 answer is "You used a video and/or audio compressor that's not supported on the other platform." Most of QuickTime's codecs are cross-platform, but not all. Specifically, Pixlet video compression is only in Mac OS X 10.3 and later. He might also have used a third-pary compressor that came with some tool. QuickTime Player (Pro) should be able to show you what format the video or audio tracks are in.

Then again, if this is the problem, QuickTime should have warned you that it didn't have all the software necessary to play the movie - it shouldn't have just refused to play it. In that case, I'd suggest that maybe your upload program put a MacBinary wrapper around the movie. All Mac browsers and FTP programs would automatically remove it, but a Windows machine wouldn't know about it. Make sure the size of the file on the server is the same as the size of the file on the Macintosh, and if not, look into how to flatten movies and upload them without MacBinary.
posted by mdeatherage at 4:41 PM on April 1, 2004

It's been years since I've done much with digital video,
but back in the day you needed to "flatten" your
Mac authored Quicktime movies before they'd be viewable on
a windows box.

A technote from Adobe on the subject (the dreaded resource
fork raising it's ugly head yet again)

It's hard to say if this is your problem, but it's worth looking into.

(I would also, acting in the pedantic mefi tradition,
recommend getting a PC or a copy of Virtual PC to test
things like this)
posted by alan at 4:41 PM on April 1, 2004

Quicktime is a catch-all for many different compression codecs. This means that merely installing the newest version of QT doesn't guarantee that you're going to have the codec to play any particular QT movie. When I publish movies on the web, I try to stick with MPEG-1. If I want the quality to be a lot higher, I might go with Sorrenson 3, or as a last resort, 3ivxD4. Sorrenson is pretty widely supported, but MPEG-1 is your best bet for reasonable quality with excellent ubiquity.
posted by squirrel at 8:58 AM on April 2, 2004

Thanks, folks. The probs been solved due to yer answers.
posted by dobbs at 5:28 PM on April 9, 2004