Pay to Play with QuickTime 7.0 Pro

Is this still true with QT7.0.1? (I know it works & have used 6.5.2 with QT 7.)

When the QuickTime 7.0.1 update now clearly says: "Installation of QuickTime 7 will disable the QuickTime Pro functionality in prior versions of QuickTime, such as QuickTime 5 or QuickTime 6" (from the Tidbits newsletter) does it mean they've realized this loophole and closed it? (That is, even if you run 6.5.2 it will no longer work?) That's what the wording seems to be saying.

Or do they just mean you need a new key to run QT7 in pro mode, but QT6 player is unaffected?

Anne

At 6:00 PM -0700 6/6/05, TidBITS Editors wrote:
> If you purchased QuickTime Pro only for its full-screen
> capabilities, you might check out the open-source MPlayer OS X,
>
> <http://mplayerosx.sourceforge.net/>

I would also recommend VLC. I keep them both around because sometimes I'll run into a file that one or the other doesn't like.

<http://www.videolan.org/vlc/>

Like MPlayer, there is a legal cloud over its ability to play MPEG-2s.

While I still chafe a bit at the need to pay for QuickTime Pro over and over again, I do so--but I balk at paying an additional $30 for the MPEG-2 component, which I only very rarely have any use for. For playback only? Get out of town. That should be more like $1-3 for life.

While we're on the subject of codecs of questionable legality, I'll mention that I have found the $15 ffmpegX to be a useful, albeit somewhat brittle, swiss army knife of video transcoding. The author stays legal by forcing his customers to download the questionable components (like mplayer) on their own, however, so it's a small hassle to install.

<http://homepage.mac.com/major4/>

--Christopher