Quicktime vs. Windows Media

Properly made QT files look better than WMV all things being equal like file size but since you don't say where the clips come from, what the codec, bitrate or sizes are it is a bit of "how long is a string?" being posed here.

As you can see my computer doesn't even come close to yours All the Quicktime videos I view work perfectly...Be it the bowser, iTunes Store or player. But the flash and WMV never come close to the quality of the Qt videos.

To say apple's h264 movies are better quality than wmv is well dumb. They just use different compression algorithms of the same mpeg4 standard. So with equal bitrates and all other things being equal the quality is pretty much equal.

As far as why your mac has a difficult time displaying quicktime movies is tough to say. I will say that apple's h264 codec is well, in my opinion, badly coded. On windows there are other h264 codecs, notably coreavc, which does a very good job at decoding h264(apple content). Not available for mac though. However, I speculate that something else is wrong with your setup as presumable you have an imac with a intel duo in it, more than powerfull enough to decode any video without breakin a sweat, even with a badly coded codec.

Does it play equally bad in both quicktime and itunes?

You are free to have unsupported opinions of course, wrong or right, think wrong in both your principal statements.

Microsoft uses non-standards for h.264...........As for h.264 for windows, go to any window forum on h.264...there 100's of non-standards being used....

And I don't like being called dumb!

Bill G. still has many, many, "if MS made it it must be better than (name anything else here)" acolytes so you are spitting in the wind with this argument.