Quick Time Hijacks Windows File Associations Only From Web Browsers
It took me 6 hours this morning to conclusively prove that Quick Time (latest version) isn’t playing well with web browsers on my Windows XP Pro (SP3) machine (nothing new here I guess).
I develop web sites which get their content from local hard or DVD/CD drives (as opposed to from the internet). All my Windows file associations for audio/video file types point to Windows Media Player (WMP) so that when one of my web pages looks for a file type of say .mpg or .mp3, WMP is opened and the file is played. Pretty straight forward and has worked fine for years.
Some time in the last few months (and I now strongly suspect after a Quick Time update) my browsers (all of them….. IE, Firefox, and Chrome) started opening Quick Time instead of WMP when my HTML goes to open any media file type. I’ve checked my Windows file associations which all still point to WMP. I also note that when I open one of my media files from a file utility such as Windows Explorer or my aftermarket file utility (as opposed to from a browser), they correctly open in WMP. So…….. its only from browsers that QT hijacks my intended media player.
In Internet Explorer I’ve gone to “Manage Add-Ons” and “disabled” Quick Time. This in fact causes QT not to be opened but instead a blank web page appears containing only the browser’s little error box with a big red X in it which usually means a picture file is missing…… WMP is not launched even though it is enabled in Manage Add-Ons and QT is disabled.
The only way I’ve found to fix this problem is to uninstall Quick Time in which case everything works fine. (My objection to Quick Time as my default media player is that even the latest version doesn’t reliably play video created for Windows file types.)
Can anyone tell me how to make Quick Time co-exist on my computer without hijacking my attempts to get at WMP from browsers?
The only reason Quick Time has existed on my computer in recent years is so I have access to iTunes. I’ve uninstalled both Quick Time and iTunes till I find a solution to this problem which means iTunes isn’t selling me anything in the mean time.
I develop web sites which get their content from local hard or DVD/CD drives (as opposed to from the internet). All my Windows file associations for audio/video file types point to Windows Media Player (WMP) so that when one of my web pages looks for a file type of say .mpg or .mp3, WMP is opened and the file is played. Pretty straight forward and has worked fine for years.
Some time in the last few months (and I now strongly suspect after a Quick Time update) my browsers (all of them….. IE, Firefox, and Chrome) started opening Quick Time instead of WMP when my HTML goes to open any media file type. I’ve checked my Windows file associations which all still point to WMP. I also note that when I open one of my media files from a file utility such as Windows Explorer or my aftermarket file utility (as opposed to from a browser), they correctly open in WMP. So…….. its only from browsers that QT hijacks my intended media player.
In Internet Explorer I’ve gone to “Manage Add-Ons” and “disabled” Quick Time. This in fact causes QT not to be opened but instead a blank web page appears containing only the browser’s little error box with a big red X in it which usually means a picture file is missing…… WMP is not launched even though it is enabled in Manage Add-Ons and QT is disabled.
The only way I’ve found to fix this problem is to uninstall Quick Time in which case everything works fine. (My objection to Quick Time as my default media player is that even the latest version doesn’t reliably play video created for Windows file types.)
Can anyone tell me how to make Quick Time co-exist on my computer without hijacking my attempts to get at WMP from browsers?
The only reason Quick Time has existed on my computer in recent years is so I have access to iTunes. I’ve uninstalled both Quick Time and iTunes till I find a solution to this problem which means iTunes isn’t selling me anything in the mean time.
Dell, Windows XP Pro, SP3
