good thing i don’t operate my mac from inside a kinkos, or i’d be sodding penniless. having to pay by the hour to use the computer after apple’s recent update of quicktime to version 7.4 is about the scariest thing i can conceive short of being suffocated under the arse of someone who’s typically asked to purchase two seats for their flight to the nude beaches of southern france.
as if i’m ever suffering from some wealth of free time, apple made sure i twittered away that bank this past weekend as my computer slowed to approximately the same pace as any movie starring both matthew mcconaughey and kate hudson; something likely showing near the precise centre of any given black hole. not entirely sure why my normally pacified mac was grinding away like a spoon in the garbage disposal, some troubleshooting revealed that the new quicktime update was in fact either a) so ‘quick’ that ‘time’ bent backward on itself and thus perceivably inert or b) an utter failure.
i don’t claim to understand the technical gibberish embedded deep within the program files, but it is sufficient to say that i understand when itunes balks at my unreasonable request that it play a tune…or anything for that matter, and instead opts to dazzle me with the hypnotic beach ball of death; perhaps its brains now powered by 7.4 only understand commands in said gibberish? it turns out the issue lies with a newly introduced ‘feature’ within the update to embolden DRM in support of the new movie rentals via itunes but also ironically gums up playback of most any other video you may have on your machine–legitimate or slightly less so–including video podcasts, which poor itunes was left befuddled trying to decipher. chalk up one more in the WIN column for DRM. now i can’t even watch that ten year old mpeg of the dancing baby cleverly synced to the tribal grunting of ‘hooked on a feeling’ that i had archived for just such a rainy day. youtube, i love you.
after hours of poring through mostly useless google searches and battling the black magic of os x’s unix underpinnings within the terminal, i decided to embark on the dangerous journey of reverting an installed system component to a version that allowed me to cuddle with itunes and the dancing baby in multimedia bliss. many thanks to pacifist for helping me dismantle the beast that is quicktime 7.4 to burn its unholy remains in my nifty metal trash can, and use its empty cave to reinstall my old friend, quicktime 7.3.1.
all said and done without all the minced words: avoid the quicktime 7.4 update as if it means to infect your human body with some terminal germ, as it’ll definitely happen to your poor mac, and squelch the voice of itunes.
