Lil' help with Quicktime please?

Factual Questions
1

Whenever I click on a quicktime link in a web browser I get the quicktime placeholder and it never plays. I know I’ve downloaded quicktime. What’s up with this?

2

Try right-clicking the link and saving the file to your hard drive. Are you then able to open it?

You may have to reinstall Quicktime.

3

What OS/version?

4

IIRC, during installation QuickTime will ask you about your browser so that it can install the proper plug-in module – but it may be automatic now in the most recent versions (actually, I do have the latest version, but I wasn’t paying attention during its installation) – so yeah, you may need to re-install.

Anyway, I rooted around and these are the likely suspects:

  • Start QuickTime > Edit > Preferences > QuickTime Preferences
  • In the drop-down menu, go to Browser Plug-in. Make sure “Play movies automatically” is checked.
  • Under “File Type Associations,” at least have “Macintosh File Types” checked. I don’t know if QT will recognize .MOV files without this association or not, but it seems logical to have that enabled.
  • Under “Streaming Proxy,” I have “Use System Settings” checked. You may need to set up a proxy server manually, though.
  • Under “Streaming Transport,” I have UDP, RTSP Port 554, which may be the default – you can also click the Auto Configure button to have QT figure it out for you (don’t know how well that works in QT, though – I could never get Real Player to work that way).
  • Under “Video Settings,” I have all options checked.

I think these options are the same for QT 5 and 6, so if you have an earlier version, you’d have to poke around a bit more. I have Win2K, but I don’t think that matters.

One last thing – I’ve noticed that QuickTime files are extremely slow to download and play – that is, it takes much longer for a QT file to open than a file of the same size in another format, so your “it never plays” problem may be a manifestation of this rather than any problems on your end. One possible way to test it is to open the QT sample file (probably located in c:\program files\quicktime\sample.mov) with your browser & see if it plays or not.

Hope this helps.