Quicktime freezes in QuickTime Player, Safari, and iTunes.

Question

Quicktime freezes in QuickTime Player, Safari, and iTunes.

I can't figure out what's going on, but a couple of days ago, Quicktime just stopped working.

If I surf to a page in Safari that has any video, Safari freezes and stops responding.
If I try to watch a video or listen to a song in iTunes, it freezes and stops responding.
If I try to watch a video in the QuickTime player, it freezes and stops responding.

Freezing may be overstating the problem just slightly. What they all specifically do is run excruciatingly slowly (and without sound). I'll see one frame, then the beachball. Then after a time, another single frame, then the beachball.

This is maddening.

I've tried rebooting and repairing permsissions. Any other ideas?

Macbook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.2)

Posted on Jan 9, 2010 10:17 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Jan 9, 2010 9:20 PM in response to Mark Stockwell

Ahhh...never mind.

Solved it (I think).

I checked to see if I had any suspicious files recently, and no dice.

Finally I looked at the console for error messages and saw some messages about Quicktime being unable to find some sound plug-in or other.

To make a long story short, the problem was my Apogee Duet. The Duet (which I absolutely love) is a a portable audio interface. The Duet really wants to be directly connected to your Mac's Firewire port because it needs to be a bandwidth hog. But I've got only a single Firewire port on my Macbook Pro, so against the recommendations of the Apogee people, I plug my Duet into one of my many Firewire disks and plug those disks into my laptop.

This ordinarily works great, but every now and then the sound gets a little messed up. And all I do is unplug the Duet from the back of the hard disk for a second and then plug it in again. Good to go.

But this time it behaved differently. Somehow it messed up my sound completely, even over reboots. And this seems to have messed up Quicktime. As Quicktime played back video files, it must have been looking for something sound related that it couldn't get, and this pretty much crippled Quicktime everywhere.

But once I did my unplug trick, everything went back to normal.

For anyone interested in audio interfaces, I absolutely love my Duet. In fairness to them, I'm using it in a way they don't recommend. Because of this, I view this problem as mostly my own dumb fault.

Reply