QuickTime 6.0.2 Released

Hungus writes "QuickTime 6.0.2 is now released from Apple and is available either via web download or via Software Update." I'd seen word that it was available earlier, but it wasn't available for me via Software Update until today. Software Update reports that this release "provides performance and reliability enhancements."

thanks for the bug report

[tps12]

I'd seen word that it was available earlier, but it wasn't available for me via Software Update until today.

Maybe your internet is broken.

Requires working Perl

[Sulka]

Interestingly, Apple uses Perl for OS X installer scripts. The Quicktime installer requires you have a Perl installation which works without having any environment variables being set using your own .bashrc (or whichever shell you're using). I recently upgraded my perl to 5.8.0 using instructions kindly provided by Apple [apple.com] only to now find out their instructions break Software Update.

I've sent them feedback but haven't yet got a reply. Nice going...

Re:Requires working Quotel

[ievans]

You might have wanted to re-read the quote and compare it to A.C. Clarke's before you made an ass of yourself in public....

Re:Requires working Quotel

[bsartist]

Any idea who first came up with the corollary to Clarke's Law? "Technology that is distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."

Two notes

[cei]

1. Requires a reboot. You'd think they'd be able to overcome that, especially for an update or patch to libraries...

2. After said restart, my first launch of Mail wants me to re-authorize Keychain to let it use my passwords to get my mail. Why would updating a QuickTime library have anything to do with my security settings?

Re:Two notes

[jezzball]

I see it's been a long time since your last reboot...

When you click "Always", it just means "Always this boot".

Dan

Re:Two notes

[cei]

I don't think so... I rebooted again just to test your theory and got no prompts for Keychain access.

No, I'm fairly certain there's a correlation between (certain) software updates and having to reassert my Keychain privledges. This makes sense for Security Updates but not so much for something like QuickTime.

This is something I've noticed for a while... I keep my Mac in multi-user mode so my wife can have her own prefs, but she's not Mac-literate enough to know what to do when she's challenged by the "Always Allow" alert box.

Re:Two notes

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct. The keychain uses a checksum of the binary in order to ensure that the Mail application trying to access a keychain item today is the same Mail app you, the user, gave authorization to do so yesterday. A software update usually updates the prebinding info in all executables, which results in a change to the checksum, hence the requirement to re-authorize access.

If it weren't for this check, somebody could have replaced your Mail application with a Trojan and get access to your keychain.

(Of course this applies to all apps, not just Mail).

Re:Two notes

[mrpuffypants]

interesting that this demonstrates just how stable OS X is...when something that happens every reboot people don't know what it looks like :)

I almost never reboot my iBook, for me it's just: close the lid, go somewhere, open it up and keep going

Re:Two notes

[jault]

No, it doesn't. I keep my Mac turned off when it's not in use, and I don't have to re-authorize access to the keychain every day.

Re:Two notes

[Pengo]

Quicktime has a lot of useful libraries for development. I have seen a lot of people using the built in XML parser as a high level interface in Objective C (from lurking on the newsgroups and looking for my own parser).

Quicktime is installed on all OS X system, it would make sense for apple to use common components.

Maybe it wasn't just quicktime that was updated but also other libs that support quicktime and other things. Who knows.

Cheers

Re:Two notes

[Dokushoka]

I had the exact same thing happen for all of my mail accounts. I found it rather peculiar.

/. Auto Notify?

[n-baxley]

It's not enough that QuickTime notifies me there's an upgrade every time I open it. Now I get notifications from slashdot as well nagging me to upgrade. Will it never end?!

Re:/. Auto Notify?

[Tuzanor]

-Change the date for your system to something high like the year 2020.
-Open Quicktime, select "Upgrade Later"
-Change the date back to the present day
-Never see those nags again...

Though this may not work with 6.0.2...

Re:/. Auto Notify?

[RedWolves2]

Awesome that worked. Thanks.

Re:/. Auto Notify?

[Into The White]

What is even worse than all the notifications, is whiners at /. complaining that Apple released a new update, as if it would be better if Apple didn't update their software. There is no way to avoid these nags except by not using /.

SuperDrive Firmware Update is also out

[Znonymous Coward]

The SuperDrive [apple.com] update is also out.

Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[babbage]

While you're upgrading your copy of Quicktime, you might also want to poke around Apple's developer's site & download their ASCIIMoviePlayer [apple.com].

Yes, that's right -- in just 200 or so well documented lines of C, Apple shows you how to get your Mac's Quicktime libraries to output high quality video as ....ascii. Eat your heart out, "Star Wars ascii guy" -- ever feel let down that you couldn't watch your home movie collection from work? Now all you need to do is open up a remote shell & play them in your Terminal/xterm/PuTTY window...

:-)

obReference: found out about this from MacOSXHints.com [macosxhints.com] earlier this week, and have been amused by it ever since...

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[ealar dlanvuli]

I cannot begin to express how disturbed my mental state is presently.

Please never do that again.

Thank you, and good day.

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[anarkhos]

It actually has practical uses. For example type this:

./ASCIIMoviePlayer /System/Library/Components/KotoeriUIServer.app/Con tents/Resources/KotoeriHelp/gfx/xicnmu.jpg

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[Yarn]

Useful. I can get at every pixel. Wonder how hard it'd be to pump this into ffmpeg.

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[goon america]

That's really cool. For some reason, the luminence is inverted, which is easy enough to fix.

Change line 174 to the following and it looks much better:
convert[255 - i] = table[i * strlen(table) / 256];

Also, you get a better framerate (ha!) using an OpenGL-based terminal like GLterm [pollet.net] which is much, much faster than the default terminal. I thought the idea of an OpenGL terminal was silly, until now.

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[babbage]

Actually, the comments made it look like you're meant to run light text on a dark background, which probably explains the luminence hack.

On a related note, I found out about a color version of the software, available (again with source etc) from this site [rug.ac.be]. I'm sure this can be pushed in all sorts of ways (command line flags for color or "greyscale" or without color afjustment, command line hints for the desired image geometry, etc), but I don't know nearly enough C to feel comfortable with such a project (being a lowly Perl hacker & hardly an expert at that).

Other observations: [a] it can take any file that Quicktime can present, including video & still images (the thought that this program or something like it could attempt to render audio into an ascii movie is too terrifying & wonderful for me to grapple with yet), [b] you should be able to save the output it produces with /usr/bin/script, save it as a "plain" text file, and then play it back on any vt100ish terminal application, up to & including vt100 terminals if you have any laying around. This too is almost too terrible & wonderful for me to properly grapple with yet :-)

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[goon america]

It's really not that hard to hack around with. I mean, it's only 200 lines, the majority of which are comments. All the work is done by the Quicktime library, which isn't that difficult to use.

Wanna open up a sf project?

One thing I was thinking about was adding a progress bar. It couldn't be that hard to do. It could use characters not used in the ASCII encoding, even overlayed on the last line of the movie.

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[protohiro1]

Oh man this is so cool. And its cool in that kind of way that I can never show it to people, because they will say, "uh, so?".

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[lamz]

That's got to be the ultimate Mac/Unix combination -- QuickTime movies in ASCII! I love it!

Re:Essential QT supplement for Unix nerds

[damiam]

You can do it on linux with mplayer -vo aa $filename.mov.

Re:Quicktime... ack

[noewun]

Stop holding back.

Re:Quicktime... ack

[BeeShoo]

Ummm...

Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs

There... that wasn't so hard now, was it?

Re:Quicktime... ack

[teh*fink]

considering you are obviously on windows i really don't think you have a right to complain about "horrible proprietary software that imbeds itself deeply." thx

Re:Quicktime... ack

[ealar dlanvuli]

I would say QT is far diffrent than the garbage windows does. QT has a very well defined scope, and the reason it's part of the OS is clearly defined (Read the documentation).

IE/WMP have no clearly defined scope, they are just programs that have been mutilated to be inseperable from the OS. They aern't even used by the OS itself unless you run the "programs" (go ahead try it, uninstall all libraries associted with IE and the executable directory itself, you are still able to do everything except launch IE even after reboot).

Re:Quicktime... ack

[LyzardKing]

Ha! Don't blame QuickTime because of an OS that clogs everything in a registry...

Re:Quicktime... ack

[AyeRoxor!]

"Ha! Don't blame QuickTime because of an OS that clogs everything in a registry..."

Yeah, I suppose if it's either all info kept in once place, or all info kept in many places, I'd choose .INI files all over my frickin' hard drive, NOT! Sheesh.

What is new in 6.0.2 ???

[ppeel]

Can someone tell me whats new in 6.02. It is a big enough download for a modem user, so unless it does something great ill stick with plain old 6.0.1

Re:What is new in 6.0.2 ???

[lamz]

Mmmmm...modems.

How about letting it download while you sleep? That always worked good for me.

colour depth problems?

[Yarn]

I use VLC and/or mplayer compiled for OS X, and upgrading to 6 broke these, VLC guys claimed this was due to QT6, and said to change to 16bit. This worked.

I later reinstalled OS X, and just didn't install QT6. So, I'd love to hear other peoples' experiences ;)

Re:colour depth problems?

[foniksonik]

The latest VLC 0.4.4 works just fine with QT 6 in millions of colors... I suggets you upgrade to that version as it also has better overall performance and is available as a binary installation.

Re:colour depth problems?

[Yarn]

thanks, I'll give it a go when my powerbook comes back from repairs.

I miss it so much it hurts sometimes.

OS9 version link

[bobdotorg]

The 10.1 MB OS9 standalone version is here:
http://wsidecar.apple.com/cgi-bin/qtc/nph-Q uickTim e.hqx

Re:OS9 version URL corrected

[bobdotorg]

I'm not sure why a space was inserted into the URL, but here it is again:

http://wsidecar.apple.com/cgi-bin/qtc/nph-QuickT im e.hqx

Can someone please mod down my previous comment.

Re:OS9 version URL corrected

[damiam]

Slashdot automatically inserts spaces in long words (URLs included) to prevent page-widening. If you don't want a URL to get a space in it, make it a link [apple.com].

WTF is this on /.?

[skinfitz]

So are we going to see /. notifications of EVERY vendor point release now??

Fix your preComps

[Canyon Rat]

The update installs a couple of new headers. To kill the annoying messages about how your precompiled headers are out of date every time you try to build something, enter the following in terminal:

sudo fixPrecomps -all