Quicktime with a question mark

Try opening the movies with QT7 that is located in your utilities folder. Use "open with" command.

Quicktime 7 is in the optional installs on your SL disk.

I got QT7 installed automatically because I had QT Pro. I'm still trying to figure out the relationships between Safari, QTX and QT7, and haven't yet come to a real understanding of what is going on. From what I've discovered so far I can say that all the movies I have in my Web Gallery actually play, on my computer, in the QT7 player (you can tell by the controller), and that when they are playing in Safari this is what is being used:

/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/QuickTime Plugin.plugin

Further, that that plugin is version 7.6.3, in other words it is the old QT7, not QTX, and was installed by the Snow Leopard upgrade, it isn't "left over" from the Leopard installation (the plugin that was there in Leopard was version 7.6.2). I have been experimenting to try to find something that plays in Safari in QTX, and have found a couple of things, but have been unable to determine why those will play in the new QTX, while most things I have continue to play in the QT7 plugin. I can't imagine that everyone who didn't get QT7 installed can no longer view their Web Gallery movies! That doesn't make sense.

Also, I have heard that if you run into content that can't be be played by QTX you should automatically get an offer to install QT7, just as with printer drivers and Rosetta.

So I would think that either your MobileMe movies should just play, or you should receive the offer to download and install QT7. I find the fact that neither is happening mystifying.

You could try popping the Snow disk back in, go to the Optional installs and go ahead and install QT7 yourself and see if you get the QuickTime Plugin and if things work correctly after that.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Don't know whether you want to continue to pursue this question here, but if you do, I have a couple of questions:

1. Could you share the address for your MobileMe gallery? I would like to take a look and see if I can either get them to play on my machine, or try to figure out why they don't.

2. Take a look at my Web Galleries and see if the movies there play on your machine.

http://gallery.mac.com/francines#gallery

All play on my machine just fine, although the streaming speed today leaves something to be desired. Also, all three seem to be using the QT7 plugin from the Internet plugins folder in /Library.

3. I believe all three movies were uploaded using either iMovie or QuickTime Pro from Leopard, quite some time ago. How were yours uploaded? Additionally, since I used the automatic functions to save for my gallery pages, they were evidently saved as m4v files.

4. Which leads to a final question: how were yours made and saved?

Finally, here's a list of the the plugins I have in /Library/Internet Plug-Ins:

Flash Player.plugin
flashplayer.xpt
Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.plugin
Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.webplugin
iPhotoPhotocast.plugin
JavaPluginCocoa.bundle
NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave
nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt
Quartz Composer.webplugin
QuickTime Plugin.plugin
WacomSafari.plugin

There's also a Disabled Plug-Ins folder, but it is empty, as is my user ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins. Don't know whether it matters, but I also have Perian installed.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Well, I am still no wiser, but will let you know if anything else occurs to me. Your movie will not play for me either. The page loads, and the poster frame loads, get a spinning pizza for maybe 20 seconds, and the a notice plastered to the bottom of the movie that QuickTime can't play it. It will download, and then plays in QT just fine. From this I'm going to assume it isn't a problem with your plugins, since it won't play for me either.

Since it was playing in QT after I downloaded it, I tried uploading it from QTX to my web gallery:

http://gallery.mac.com/francines#100086

I'll take it down of course as soon as I finish trying to figure this out. Anyway, the point is that it plays there just fine, but I quickly discovered that QTX had converted it to the m4v format for the two larger versions, and to a 3gp format for the smallest version.

So I wondered if the mp4 format was the problem. I seem to have disposed of most of my mp4s online, but did find one still up:

http://homepage.mac.com/francines/.Movies/kenstr.html

Oddly enough in the web page it plays in the QT7 plugin (you can tell by the control bar), but downloaded it plays in QTX. And if I drag the downloaded mp4 into the Safari window it plays with QTX, as does the download I did of your movie!

And I am indeed running Snow Leopard, and have been working on my review here:

http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/snowleo1.html

It is working surprisingly well. This is the first real glitch that I can't understand AT ALL that I've run into.

One final question: how did you get your movie into your Gallery? I ask because there are several different ways to do that. As I mentioned above, I put your movie up using the QTX Player, went to the Share menu and selected MobileMe Gallery.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Play fine for me in firefox.

OK, first the only mp4 I had was the tiny one of my friend Ken, not in the Web Gallery. YOUR movie, which I uploaded to the Web Gallery with QTX, is NOT an mp4. QTX converted the original mp4 into mv4 when instructed to upload to the Web Gallery. It did so autmatically without any instruction from me.

Putting your mp4 into iPhoto, then instructing it to upload to my Web Gallery preserves it as an mp4, and now, as is the case on your Web Gallery, it won't play. Here's the direct link:

http://gallery.me.com/francines#100094

I'm still no wiser as to what the problem is, since other mp4s will play just fine off the iDisk.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

Now for something completely weird. I have a page that specifies playing an mp3 in the QuickTime player, which works fine:

http://homepage.mac.com/francines/Sites/articles/markmusic.html

The mp3 should load, and since I have QT 7 installed, that controller loads and you can play the song, no problem (not sure what will happen if one only has QTX).

So I replaced the link to the mp3 with a link to your mp4, and it takes awhile to load, as if it really is fetching the file. But it is broken, you just get the Q with a question mark. HOWEVER, directly below where the movie should be is a direct link to the mp4, and if you click that "Movie" link the mp4 actually loads and plays, once it finishes re-loading.

http://homepage.mac.com/francines/.Movies/movietest.html

I tried the page in the Opera web browser, and the movie loaded and played using QT 7 just fine!

So my conclusion is that something is broken in the relationship between Safari and the QuickTime plugin when it comes to handling mp4s. Safari can actually play mp4s, and so can both QT7 and QTX. But when Safari is told to play an mp4 using QT, it breaks down.

I'm going to see if I can round up a QT expert to take a look at this thread and make some sense of all this.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder

You should have QT10 (comes with 10.6). Also, look in your Utilities Folder for QT7. If it's not there, then you don't have it. You very well may have an alias for an older version of QT in your Dock. Look in your Applications folder for QT10.

I've gotten several confirmations by those more expert than I that something is broken in the interaction between the QuickTime plug-in, QTX, your movie, and Safari.

As to why, it appears that the reason more people haven't seen it is a result of the encoding of the movie itself. One person examined the movie and discovered that it didn't have the preferred encoding for streaming mpeg-4, re-encoded it and uploaded it to your page. His version does indeed play.

From what he has said I concluded that your Sony camera is not using the most "modern" encoding method for mpeg-4, see this:

http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/ICME.2001.1237698

He re-encoded the version he uploaded to that Advanced Simple format.

Furthermore, when iPhoto imports the movie from the camera it does not re-encode to the better format, nor does it re-encode when putting the movie up on MobileMe. And then something has gone awry in the handling of this older format by QTX as it is working in Safari, so that it is not playing the movie itself, nor handing it off to QT 7 correctly. Evidently this can fail in several different ways, and the fellow who pointed that out wasn't sure which one was at fault.
Francine


Francine
Schwieder