The Slow Agony of QuickTime 7

With Mac OS X 10.7.4 update, QuickTime 7 (and all apps using good old QuickTime API) is showing green screen on paused H264 videos. QuickTime X behaves correctly.

This problem is affecting on a daily basis thousands of people still using QuickTime for mission-critical video tasks, but was not considered important enough by Apple to be solved during 10.7.4 development.

One year after Final Cut X getting free of its QuickTime roots, does this mean the Apple no longer cares about QuickTime legacy? Sure, QuickTime 7 stills runs on Mac OS X 10.8, but it’s safe to bet that future OS X releases will not support 32-bit technologies, and this will automatically put the nail on the QuickTime API coffin.

As a vendor relying heavily on QuickTime API, this is a top concern. We have already taken the first steps to cut our dependency on the 21 years old technology that brought multimedia to computers. Our services and apps are being rewritten to be platform-agnostic and we think that by 2013 we will be ready.