Quicktime error

[Nikalaya]

Hi!

 

I have a system of 20 watchout display running on watchout 5 since 2 years.

Yesterday for the first time one display stop working saying quicktime error.

When i logged on the machine all video clips were linked with windows media player.

I uninstalled Quictime and re-installed it, then make sure quicktime is set up as the default player.

Everything worked fine for 2 shows and then pouf! again the quictime error and all video clips assign to windows media player.

 

Im running watchout 5.5 on Windows 7 64bit.

 

Any comments will help.

 

Nikalaya

[RBeddig]

Hi Nikalaya,

 

Quicktime is a not a codec format. There are many different codecs which relate to Quicktime but could be played through the Windows Media player too if it has the right filter.

 

Which format causes the problem? If you open the file with the quicktime player and look at the clip information (strg+I, if I'm not mistaken) it should tell you more about the file format. There are also some programs which give you more details. On my Mac I use "MediaInfo" or "VideoSpec" for this purpose.

 

WATCHOUT does not use Quicktime for most codecs anymore. Even Quicktime formats like QT Animation and H.264 are played through a Dataton filter using Media Player.

 

I would suggest to reinstall the latest Quicktime and not to change any media playback preferences at all. You could also do a reinstall of WATCHOUT so that this application can set the right filters in the registry again.

 

There is also a very good tool for Windows (graphedit/graphstudio) which can tell you exactly how DirectShow will play a specific file. It needs to run on the computer which causes problems since it uses the installed filters.

 

One more point: have you updated anything recently? If not, a problem with your hard drive (corrupt data) could also lead to such a problem.

 

Hope it helps

 

Rainer

[Adela Kriland]

Hi Nikalaya,

 

The only idea that I can get is that the files are corrupted or you got some troubles with windows. Do you have a back up image of your display computer? Can you make it as new again?

WATCHOUT does not use quicktime any longer on the Display computer side.  Since version 5.3 at least. 

 

Or delete the show from the display machine and transfer it again so is a clean cash. 

 

Just ideas. Hope you can fix it soon.

 

Regards

 

Adela

[Mike Fahl]

WATCHOUT does not use quicktime any longer on the Display computer side

 

Not entirely true. WATCHOUT no longer requires QuickTime. But if you have it on the machine, it can still use it to play content not supported natively by WATCHOUT. WATCHOUT natively plays QuickTime Animation and H.264 video in .MOV files without using QuickTime. Yes, this is somewhat confusing. The reason being that QT Animation is still the most widely used video file format when there's a need for alpha channel in the video, so we provide our own codec here. H.264 is also commonly used in MOV files, and MOV is essentially the standard container format for H.264, even when the file has other extension, such as M4V and MP4, so we provide a codec for this as well.

 

But for other formats in MOV files (e.g., MJPEG, Sorensson, etc), QT will be used as a fallback if available. Note that use of these formats is deprecated in WATCHOUT, and is really only supported as legacy formats. Using them may have negative impact on performance, not just of the video itself, but also of other content played at the same time.

 

Mike