QuickTime 10 Close Window

Had the same problem: Close Window in the menu was permanently greyed out and there was no close button in the window title bar (or any other buttons for that matter).

Trashing the Quicktime preference files solved the problem for me.

Quit Quicktime, then in the Finder, go into your user folder, Library folder, Preferences and search for "quicktime" while limiting the search scope to the “Preferences” folder and “File Name” (using the search options at the top of the window), then select the files listed and trash them, and restart Quicktime.

Hiding an application doesn't close it's open windows, it just hides them from view … but they're still open and active, and if a movie is playing in them it remains playing when hidden even though you can't see it (you can still hear it though). The same is true for pretty much all apps and windows. In Safari windows, banners and flash animations and javascript applications in hidden windows keep running and slowing the machine down and draining the battery even when hidden or otherwise out of view. So there's a lot to be said for actually closing a window rather than just hiding it.

All of this may change when Lion is released and apps are rewritten to take advantage of the new OS features that will make MacOS work more like iOS.

I've been having this issue since Snow Leopard... Lion it got worse because it restores the previous window even when you quit so I was inspired to try to fix it and was able to do so deleting the .plist

Quit the Quicktime.app

Finder > Go > hold option key and click Library > open the Preferences. In the ~/Library/Preferences and delete the com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX.plist and you will get an option to hit an x on hover in the upper left of the window and Command+W will work

I am guessing the MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoTitlebar set to -1 was a problem

Alexander Robinson1 is correct; you don't need to delete all your preferences - just set them up correctly.

You just need to type this into a terminal window:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX MGCinematicWindowDebugForceNoTitlebar 0

This turns on the title bar of the movies you are opening (it is not there at the moment I am sure). For some reason, when the titlebar is absent the Close option on the File menu is also unavailable - that is really rather daft, but there you go.

In order to prevent persistent windows between innovations, you also need this:

defaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false

@ martinfrommanningtree,

I tried to do what you said but it didn't work. I wonder if i pasted it in wrong. I'm a noob.. could you tell me exactly what to type in the terminal after my computer name with a dollar sign?

Yes - this greyed out thing is a complete time wasting pain. There seem to be teams of software experts inventing new time wasting things with every generation of OS X - they probably haven't got enough to do and they should sack a few!

It is particularly frustrating in Lion etc due to it always reopening windows when they are not shut down (a feature I don't ever want - can be switched off in an obscure tab in General Preferences but why? Making extra work for us - a concept those bored sorftware engineers don't seem to grasp).

So in summary - now whenever I open Quicktime 10 I have hundreds of older files that open too because I can't close them down. Brilliant Apple - give yourselves a medal.

Your Terminal command worked a treat.

I have been using Quicktime 7 for years, because of this problem in QuicktimeX that I could not overcome.

After reading about QuicktimeX in Macworld, I decided to give it another try. Without your help, this would have been impossible.

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!!