QuickTime 7.0.3 (#5): Extremely slow iPod-ready exporting; More problems with movie trailers

Extremely slow iPod-ready exporting We continue coverage of extremely slow encoding times for the MPEG-4 and H.264 compression components in QuickTime Pro 7.0.3, in addition to an inability (in some cases) to play the resultant video files on fifth-generation iPods.

MacFixIt reader Steve writes:

"I have an older iBook 700 MHz, but I certainly did not expect it to take so long to convert a 60 sec .mov to MPEG-4. You may ask how long. After an hour, I feel asleep. The progress bar had barely was progressing very slowly when I decided to go to bed and leave computer on encoding.

Sebastian Meyer adds:

"I can attest that the export to iPod ready videos is ridiculously slow.

"For fun I decided to export the original 5GB iPod's presentation video. The video happens to be in 320 by 240 already, and I assume that the people who encoded it knew what they were doing. It did come from Apple itself, after all. But even with this video it took so long that I thought the export had crashed.

"This is definitely not something you could do on a whim just to drop an video on an iPod. It's more something to let churn away over night, even for this 7 min clip."

More problems with movie trailers We also continue coverage of an issue where newly posted movie trailers (which, in many cases require QuickTime 7.0.3) are not playing in Mac OS X 10.3.9 -- the earliest Mac OS X revision compatible with QuickTime 7.0.3. A number of Mac OS X 10.3.9 users have experienced issues with playback distortion when attempting to view the newly encoded trailers.

MacFixIt reader Russ Madden writes:

"I can confirm continued problems with the new Apple movie trailer site using QuickTime 7.0.3 and Mac OS X 10.3.9. I have a 500 MHz iMac with DSL and never before had a problem watching even full-screen trailers (though I was unable to properly view HD trailers). Now, trying to watch 'large' (and sometimes even 'medium') size (non-HD) trailers results in a series of still pictures or, at best, jerky motion. The sound plays fine, however, but there is no synch and not much to actually watch."

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Previous coverage:

• QuickTime 7.0.3 (#4): Extremely slow MPEG-4 export times, problems exporting to iPod-compatible format; more
• QuickTime 7.0.3 (#3): Problems with Ac3-encoded audio linger; Some third-party applications exhibiting problems; more
• QuickTime 7.0.3 (#2): Now appearing in Software Update; Video skipping problem solved
• Apple releases QuickTime 7.0.3 -- required for iTunes 6.0, release notes

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