Quicktime 7 plays movie but skips frames

You might need more RAM and faster Mac.

Or try to close all other applications at background and see if that helps.

This is a bug in Quicktime 7 (and you mean you're using 7.0.1, not 7.1, which isn't out yet). I'm currently trying to find the answer to this question too. More RAM, etc. isn't the fix--movies played fine under Quicktime 6.5.2.

It is not a bug of the QuickTime Player. It has been a part of QuickTime since its introduction to sacrifice some frames (frame rate) to maintain playback.
The faster your processor (more RAM helps, too) the more frames you'll see in a QuickTime movie.

I just noticed what hardware Bill Graham1 lists as his Mac--a Power Mac 7300 running Tiger. He has to be using something like XPostFacto to get it to run on this older Mac. In any case, even if this 7300 has a processor board upgrade, it's not designed to handle Quicktime 7 video at a decent speed. I'd be interested to hear Bill's experience with Quicktime 6.5.2, under OS 10.3.x on his 7300--did it play movies at a normal speed? If so, then that would confirm he's seeing the Quicktime 7 bug, which is actually real--check some of the other posts in the Quicktime section from people with G4 Macs that are more than fast enough to play movie files using Quicktime 7, but who are seeing this problem, where other people with the same Mac model aren't, which indicates it's some sort of bug. My Mac, a G4 AGP at 500 mhz, played MPEG-1 movie files just fine, under OS 10.3.x, using Quicktime 6.5.2, but when I installed OS 10.4, which requires Quicktime 7, the same movie files now play for a few seconds, then stop; if I hit the Quicktime Player window's pause button, then press it again, the video starts playing at a normal speed, but only after skipping some frames, and then plays again for only a few seconds. If I keep doing this, the whole video plays, but that's not how it's supposed to work. The same thing happens when you run Quicktime Player 6.5.2 under OS 10.4.x--you can't run the Quicktime 6.5.2 installer under OS 10.4.x, but you can run its Quicktime Player application if you copy it from a Mac that has 6.5.2 installed--but it doesn't help, indicating the problem is something in the Quicktime 7 extensions, or a problem with some OS file(s) that affect Quicktime playback, at least with MPEG-1 files--I haven't tried any MPEG-2 files.

If you play these same MPEG-1 files using VLC Media Player instead of Quicktime Player, they play with no pauses, on these same "slow" Macs. I don't think VLC relies on Quicktime software. This further implicates Quicktime 7 as the cause of the problem.

Im using a g4 ibook 1.2ghz and i have exactly the same problem as bill....I dont have many programs open and the cpu usage goes throught the roof with qt7 and staggers and makes pretty much everything unviewable 😟 what can I do??? is there something wrong with my mac?

Oh and yer vlc plays my stuff fine...but i want qt 7 to work too damit 😟

I'm using the latest powerbook g4 and have the same exact problem as well. What kind of processor / ram is needed for Quicktime7?

I´m having a parallel problem:

QuickTime (7) plays my playlist movies ok (written w SMIL code, played by QuickTimePlayer), but when the playlist .mov contains more than one movie, playback gets stuttering and drops lots of frames. This has got nothing to do with how big the movies are.

Does anyone have any ideas?

You really can't tell much about what is happening here unless the report contains information on the type of video codec (MPEG2, MPEG4, H.264, etc.) that is being used and the dimensions of the movie. Some QuickTime movies will only play well on high-end G5 systems while others will do just fine on G3s.

However, here is a link that discusses two potential issue with QuickTime 7 playback:

MPEG 4 - poor playback performance since Tiger/QT7

I'm having the same problem, and I found out in the worst way. I give a lot of presentations, using a lot of QuickTime video. I checked a presentation on a Sunday, updated to QT Pro 7 on Monday, and on Wednesday gave a presentation that was a complete disaster because none of the video would play correctly. I had no other applications running, am running a 1.5ghz G4 Titanium with 1gb of RAM. I have since gone back and none of the half-dozen programs I routinely use when giving seminars works correctly. And, sadly, I have no idea what to do other than borrow my son's iBook that still is running Panther and QT 6.5.2. Aaargh!

I suspect that you must have done more than simply update to QuickTime 7 Pro because if you were running Tiger you already had to be using QuickTime 7. The QT Pro update doesn't do much, it just allows access to capabilities that are already present in your current installation of QuickTime.

However, if you are using Panther you can always go back to using QuickTime 6 with the QuickTime 6 reinstaller. So, in the latter case you'd have another option other than borrowing your son's iBook.

The only other possibility is that you are claiming that it was the simple act of entering a QuickTime Pro registration key that caused your problems. I guess anything is possible, but that seems highly unlikely as a cause of your difficulties.

Did you update anything else? Did you change QuickTime versions? Did you perhaps also update from QuickTime 7.0 or 7.0.1 to 7.0.2?

Try the Audio MIDI Setup application (Utilities folder).
Set the audio output format to 44100Hz.
Quit and relaunch QuickTime Player and try the file again.

Well, I was on Panther and updated from 6.5.2 to 7.0 Pro. Thinking that the problem might have been the combination of 7.0 and Panther, I subsequently bought Tiger, but that didn't solve the problem. Neither has going from 7.0 all the way to 7.0.2.
Oddly, since my upgrade to Tiger, these clips will play fine in Keynote2, but will stutter if I play them simply on Quicktime. I've checked the midi settings as suggested elsewhere, but they were correct.

video codec H.264 or Apple Intermediate. 1024 x 768 pixels. Works very well with 10.3.7 and QuickTime 6.5 (Apple Intermediate, that is), but stutters after changing movies in a playlist. If you hit the spacebar and stop playback for just a fraction of a second everything goes back to normal and plays the file smoothly UNTIL it´s time to play the next movie in the list, when the symptoms return again.

This has NOTHING to do with the hardware - believe me! I´m using the dual 867 G4 with 1.25G RAM - and the MacMini 1.25 GHz with 256 Meg RAM... AND on my dual 2.5 GHz G5 with 8 Gb RAM and the GeForce 9800 ULTRA, and they all do it.

Oh... I forgot the fps, which is 25