iTunes 7.0.2 Special Report: Video stuttering: pauses, skips, etc.

Video stuttering (pauses, skips and other glitches usually with media purchased from the iTunes Store) continue in iTunes 7.0.2. There is some evidence that this is not an iTunes-specific issue, but rather an issue with QuickTime, which iTunes uses for video playback.

One reader writes:

"I have had problems with TV shows that I have downloaded with iTunes 7.0.1. The video stutters which makes watching said shows really annoying. I have some shows that I downloaded and watched with iTunes 6.x and they were fine. I am using a 12" PowerBook with 1.2 gigs of memory with Tiger on it. I tried upgrading to 7.0.2 hoping it would help and while it did improve the playback it did not fix it."

Another reader adds

"The stuttering is most pronounced right at the beginning of a video and intermittently throughout.  Running Activity Monitor doesn't show an abnormal amount of processor activity, but there is a large amount of disk writes right around the time the stuttering occurs.  I'm not sure why iTunes does a bunch of disk writes while starting to play videos and at intermittent times because I would think that it would be reading from the drive and caching it somewhere.  Looking at the Activity Monitor, it does show that there is also a fair amount of disk reading going on, probably for caching, but at a much lower level that the writes.  I believe these disk writes are somehow directly related to the stuttering issue.  I've watched the videos using Quicktime Player and the writes don't occur and coincidentally or not, the stuttering doesn't either."

Despite potentially being a QuickTime-related issue, stuttering can sometimes be resolved by opening the videos in QuickTime Player. As such, there may simply be a problem with iTunes' use of the QuicKTime playback engine, rather than with the engine itself.

You can open videos displayed in iTunes with the QuickTime Player via the following method:

1. Press Command-R to reveal the movie file in the Finder
2. Press Command-O to open the movie file in its default creator, QuickTime Player

Index:

• Album by artist and year do work with iPod
• Audio distortion
• Crashes/quits while library is updating -- fixes
• Installation problems -- fix
• Language/country erroneously switched
• Long playlists, problems
• Playback problems (songs, videos will not play)
• Permissions changes in this release: Explanation
• Re-launches (uncontrollable)
• Podcasts stored on iPods not displayed properly in iTunes
• Release notes
• Reverting (downgrading) to iTunes 6.0.5
• Screen re-draw problems
• Slow podcast, media downloads
• Video stuttering: pauses, skips, etc.
• Volume Logic still incompatible

Resources