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Quicktime HD playback issues - strange green bars/severe color issues.

I'm throwing up the white flag. I need help!

I work for an extremely large stock video provider and we have a very large and important client who has gotten one of our clips... It's a 720p clip that plays back @ 59.94fps. The client purchased the clip from us and has gotten it and claim on playback it has severe color issues and tracking problems. I've seen the client's example - it 'quadrants' up, strange green bars appear between the bars and then the clip jumps color to almost... negative.

The big issue I'm having is I cannot for the life of me reproduce the problem. We have 6 G5's in our department alone and none of them will replicate the issue. I've tried that, I've tried playing it back on our Kona TV - everything looks 100% AOK on our end.

Any idea what would cause this errored playback? Everytime I gently approach the idea of 'maybe its your system' I get violently rebuffed. I'm under a tight time line, a considerable account is at stake and any info at all would be helpful.

Here's a link of the flawed playback:

<post edited by Host>

G5 Quad (PPC), Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Mar 3, 2008 3:08 PM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Mar 3, 2008 3:20 PM

Yes, that link does not work properly for me.

If you were the one having the playback problems I would offer the following advice:

If you are having problems playing MPEG4 video in Quicktime 7.4 (and Apple are aware that some users have had such problems) you should carefully check in

/Library/Quicktime and
/Library/Internet Plug-ins and
Home/Library/Quicktime

to check whether you have any third party plug-ins that are not completely up to date.

Current versions of Flip4Mac and DiVX and Perian do NOT cause failure alone or in combination. However the one SPECIFIC extension that ALWAYS causes the failure alone or in groups is 3ivxMediaImp. All other 3ivx extensions DO work. Remove only that ONE SPECIFIC extension.

Please try this and see if it fixes your problem with QT Player, the QT Firefox Plugin, and iTunes not playing MPEG4 files (including mp4 files).

Older 3ivx and DivX components are often incompatible with new QuickTime versions and are, in many cases, obviated by component packs like Perian.

This is not the only explanation for issues with MPEG4 file playback in QuickTime 7.4 and later, however. The issue with videos from democracynow.org and others, for instance, is the result of that content not complying with MPEG4 standards (namely that they use bogus track dimensions). QuickTime had previously ignored invalid track dimensions but this was changed in order to support properly authored anamorphic content.

The recent update to QT 7.4.1 has fixed a number of issues but some problems are unavoidable when working with non-standards compliant content. The standards are important for many reasons including keeping hackers from manipulating improperly coded web pages.

However, there is a workaround (also the basis for why those files will still play in iTunes): there are a few ways to trick QuickTime into ignoring the invalid track data. For instance, rename the files .3GP and they'll show up just fine.

Instead I would ask if you used the correct mpeg4 standard to encode the video?
8 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Mar 3, 2008 3:20 PM in response to intellivised

Yes, that link does not work properly for me.

If you were the one having the playback problems I would offer the following advice:

If you are having problems playing MPEG4 video in Quicktime 7.4 (and Apple are aware that some users have had such problems) you should carefully check in

/Library/Quicktime and
/Library/Internet Plug-ins and
Home/Library/Quicktime

to check whether you have any third party plug-ins that are not completely up to date.

Current versions of Flip4Mac and DiVX and Perian do NOT cause failure alone or in combination. However the one SPECIFIC extension that ALWAYS causes the failure alone or in groups is 3ivxMediaImp. All other 3ivx extensions DO work. Remove only that ONE SPECIFIC extension.

Please try this and see if it fixes your problem with QT Player, the QT Firefox Plugin, and iTunes not playing MPEG4 files (including mp4 files).

Older 3ivx and DivX components are often incompatible with new QuickTime versions and are, in many cases, obviated by component packs like Perian.

This is not the only explanation for issues with MPEG4 file playback in QuickTime 7.4 and later, however. The issue with videos from democracynow.org and others, for instance, is the result of that content not complying with MPEG4 standards (namely that they use bogus track dimensions). QuickTime had previously ignored invalid track dimensions but this was changed in order to support properly authored anamorphic content.

The recent update to QT 7.4.1 has fixed a number of issues but some problems are unavoidable when working with non-standards compliant content. The standards are important for many reasons including keeping hackers from manipulating improperly coded web pages.

However, there is a workaround (also the basis for why those files will still play in iTunes): there are a few ways to trick QuickTime into ignoring the invalid track data. For instance, rename the files .3GP and they'll show up just fine.

Instead I would ask if you used the correct mpeg4 standard to encode the video?

Mar 3, 2008 3:41 PM in response to Klaus1

Klaus,

I appreciate the input - however the issue isn't with the .mp4 playback - that was just a low res example. The issue is with the 10-bit uncompressed HD file that the client can't get to work yet we can. Do you know if any of the issues you mentioned above would be the cause of this particular problem?

The link was from the actual client, they might have yanked the clip.

Mar 3, 2008 4:35 PM in response to intellivised

Yep, that's from the client's machine - not ours. Everything plays fine on our end - seriously we have had this looked on 5 different machines. Client INSISTS that it isn't his machine but if I had a dollar (or a pound sterling!) for every time I heard that well I'd be on vacation right now. I'm convinced it's a quicktime issue - some codec isn't behaving nicely.

Everytime I suggest that I get yelled at by a client too proud to admit 'hey, maybe there IS an issue here.'

If I could track down the SPECIFIC issue then maybe this person would listen - but they've been so rude I'm not sure I want to help them anymore.

Apr 12, 2008 5:48 PM in response to intellivised

All of the sudden i am getting this Forbidden message when I open Safari the exact words are

_+ *You don't have permission to access http://www.yahoo.com/ on this server. *+_

_+ *Apache Server at www.yahoo.com Port 8100 *+_

i have no idea how to fix this because i cant find a guide anywhere... I can only find them for 10.5 and its Leopard. So i cant fix it. Also my other browsers work like Firefox, but safari still says forbidden

Quicktime HD playback issues - strange green bars/severe color issues.

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