QuickTime vs. QuickTime
One of the notable updates that came with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger was QuickTime 7. It offers significant improvements by way of H.264, a codec that offers radically-improved video quality at lower data-rates than Sorenson 3, the old stand-by that’s getting, well, old.
However:
- Some editing functionality in the Pro version doesn’t work. This seems to be a result of bugs in QuickTime Player.app, as opposed to QuickTime itself, as using a copy of QuickTime Player 6.5 restores this functionality.
- Multi-node QuickTime VR panoramas still function properly, unless you need to be able to tell where hotspots (links between nodes) are. Then you have to rely on clairvoyance.
- While most of the bugs primarily affect QuickTime Player (as opposed to the arguably more-important browser plug-in) and are mostly related to authoring functions rather than playback issues, few (if any) of them were addressed by the recent release of QuickTime 7.0.1. This release seems aimed more at users of Final Cut Pro.
- There’s still no sign of QuickTime 7 for Windows. Normally this would be quite annoying, but with these outstanding bugs, this is a good thing.
