Thursday, March 23, 2006
Jason to QuickTime & Firefox: You Suck (Bonus: CODEC Hell)
Posted by Jason Dunn in "THOUGHT" @ 09:00 AM
If there's one thing in the tech world that I dislike more than anything else, it's probably when an application completely, utterly, and totally misbehaves, doesn't do what it's supposed to do, and pits itself against the user. Case in point: I'm running QuickTime 7.0.4 on Windows XP Professional. I really dislike the QuickTime player, but there's some good content out there in QuickTime format, so I needed to have it installed. My first, and most major, frustration with it is that despite my best efforts, I cannot seem to get it to leave my browser alone when it comes to playing back certain file types. In short, after installing it all sorts of file types (MP3s being the most common) now play back inside my browser instead of an external application. You'd think that the settings found under Edit > Preferences > QuickTime Preferences > Browser > MIME Settings would be how you'd control this, right? The only MIME type I have checked off on that list is QuickTime Movie - I've checked it several times, yet MP3s continue to play back within my browser (Firefox). I've also checked the File Types tab and the only check box there is QuickTime Movie as well.
After digging some more, I thought to myself "Hmm - even though I set the MIME type setting during the initial install, what if QuickTime doesn't pass those settings to Firefox properly?". So in Firefox's Tools > Options > Download Options I discovered the real source of the problem: I never told Firefox to use QuickTime to open MP3s, that's exactly what it was doing. So Firefox gets my wag of the finger for this bad behaviour - it shouldn't make assumptions about what the user wants without asking, and it should respect whatever MIME settings QuickTime is passing to it during the install.
It seems that QuickTime was also designed to behave illogically- when I'm in the QuickTime player, I see something labelled movie trailer, and I click on it, what do you think the average user would expect to happen? Why, for the movie trailer to start playing of course! QuickTime is set to auto-detect bandwidth for streaming quality, so the video should stream in a high-bandwidth format. What does it do instead? It opens up a browser window and starts looking for iTunes - as if it were a requirement for watching a friggin' video file! Ridiculous. I know Apple wants to extend their clutches as far as they can (hey, it's a business after all), but this type of arrogant application behaviour is insulting to the end user. And yes, Windows Media Player does something similar and it's always ticked me off, but it doesn't look for another application - it plays the video file, usually in a browser. What it should do, of course, is play the video file inside the video player.
Why not use QuickTime Alternative you might be asking? Well, I did last year, and I ended up with some really funky stability problems in explorer.exe that were related to QuickTime DLLs - I don't want to go that route again. In fact, "codec hell" is one of the things I'm trying to avoid in 2006 - my digital video editing laptop is a complete disaster now because of all the codecs I've loaded on to it. I've had bizarre problems with Windows Media Player 10 - when I connect my Zen Vision:M to it and try to transcode DVR-MS files to WMV, it bombs out. Several other codec-related problems also occur on it, so I've become rather gun-shy about slapping those big "All in One" codec packs onto my PCs. It's far too easy for applications to break when the wrong codec, or even the wrong version of a codec, is loaded. Developers need to do more to make their applications resistant to freaky codec problems.
Got any great "misbehavin' application" stories to share?
After digging some more, I thought to myself "Hmm - even though I set the MIME type setting during the initial install, what if QuickTime doesn't pass those settings to Firefox properly?". So in Firefox's Tools > Options > Download Options I discovered the real source of the problem: I never told Firefox to use QuickTime to open MP3s, that's exactly what it was doing. So Firefox gets my wag of the finger for this bad behaviour - it shouldn't make assumptions about what the user wants without asking, and it should respect whatever MIME settings QuickTime is passing to it during the install.
It seems that QuickTime was also designed to behave illogically- when I'm in the QuickTime player, I see something labelled movie trailer, and I click on it, what do you think the average user would expect to happen? Why, for the movie trailer to start playing of course! QuickTime is set to auto-detect bandwidth for streaming quality, so the video should stream in a high-bandwidth format. What does it do instead? It opens up a browser window and starts looking for iTunes - as if it were a requirement for watching a friggin' video file! Ridiculous. I know Apple wants to extend their clutches as far as they can (hey, it's a business after all), but this type of arrogant application behaviour is insulting to the end user. And yes, Windows Media Player does something similar and it's always ticked me off, but it doesn't look for another application - it plays the video file, usually in a browser. What it should do, of course, is play the video file inside the video player.
Why not use QuickTime Alternative you might be asking? Well, I did last year, and I ended up with some really funky stability problems in explorer.exe that were related to QuickTime DLLs - I don't want to go that route again. In fact, "codec hell" is one of the things I'm trying to avoid in 2006 - my digital video editing laptop is a complete disaster now because of all the codecs I've loaded on to it. I've had bizarre problems with Windows Media Player 10 - when I connect my Zen Vision:M to it and try to transcode DVR-MS files to WMV, it bombs out. Several other codec-related problems also occur on it, so I've become rather gun-shy about slapping those big "All in One" codec packs onto my PCs. It's far too easy for applications to break when the wrong codec, or even the wrong version of a codec, is loaded. Developers need to do more to make their applications resistant to freaky codec problems.
Got any great "misbehavin' application" stories to share?
